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+Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3), by John Morley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3)
+       Essay 1: Robespierre
+
+Author: John Morley
+
+Release Date: March 3, 2007 [EBook #20733]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBESPIERRE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Graeme Mackreth and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CRITICAL
+MISCELLANIES
+
+BY
+
+JOHN MORLEY
+
+VOL. I. Essay 1: Robespierre
+
+London
+MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+1904
+
+CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
+
+ROBESPIERRE.
+
+I.
+
+                                                                 PAGE
+
+Introduction                                                        1
+
+Different views of Robespierre                                      4
+
+His youthful history                                                5
+
+An advocate at Arras                                                7
+
+Acquaintance with Carnot                                           10
+
+The summoning of the States-General                                11
+
+Prophecies of revolution                                           12
+
+Reforming Ministers tried and dismissed                            13
+
+Financial state of France                                          14
+
+Impotence of the Monarchy                                          17
+
+The Constituent Assembly                                           19
+
+Robespierre interprets the revolutionary movement rightly          21
+
+The Sixth of October 1789                                          23
+
+Alteration in Robespierre's position                               25
+
+Character of Louis XVI.                                            28
+
+And of Marie Antoinette                                            29
+
+The Constitution and Robespierre's mark upon it                    34
+
+Instability of the new arrangements                                37
+
+Importance of Jacobin ascendancy                                   41
+
+The Legislative Assembly                                           42
+
+Robespierre's power at the Jacobin Club                            44
+
+His oratory                                                        45
+
+The true secret of his popularity                                  48
+
+Aggravation of the crisis in the spring of 1792                    50
+
+The Tenth of August 1792                                           52
+
+Danton                                                             53
+
+Compared with Robespierre                                          55
+
+Robespierre compared with Marat and with Sieyès                    57
+
+Character of the Terror                                            58
+
+
+II.
+
+Fall of the Girondins indispensable                                60
+
+France in desperate peril                                          61
+
+The Committee of Public Safety                                     65
+
+At the Tuileries                                                   67
+
+The contending factions                                            70
+
+Reproduced an older conflict of theories                           72
+
+Robespierre's attitude                                             73
+
+The Hébertists                                                     77
+
+Chaumette and his fundamental error                                80
+
+Robespierre and the atheists                                       82
+
+His bitterness towards Anacharsis Clootz                           86
+
+New turn of events (March 1794)                                    90
+
+First breach in the Jacobin ranks: the Hébertists                  90
+
+Robespierre's abandonment of Danton                                91
+
+Second breach: the Dantonians (April 1794)                         95
+
+Another reminiscence of this date                                  97
+
+Robespierre's relations to the Committees changed                  98
+
+The Feast of the Supreme Being                                    101
+
+Its false philosophy                                              103
+
+And political inanity                                             104
+
+The Law of Prairial                                               106
+
+Robespierre's motive in devising it                               107
+
+It produces the Great Terror                                      109
+
+Robespierre's chagrin at its miscarriage                          112
+
+His responsibility not to be denied                               112
+
+  (1) Affair of Catherine Théot                                   113
+
+        "       Cécile Renault                                    114
+
+  (2) Robespierre stimulated popular commissions                  115
+
+The drama of Thermidor: the combatants                            117
+
+Its conditions                                                    118
+
+The Eighth Thermidor                                              119
+
+Inefficiency of Robespierre's speech                              121
+
+The Ninth Thermidor                                               123
+
+Famous scene in the Convention                                    125
+
+Robespierre a prisoner                                            127
+
+Struggle between the Convention and the Commune                   129
+
+Death of Robespierre                                              131
+
+Ultimate issue of the struggle between the Committees
+and the Convention                                                132
+
+
+
+
+ROBESPIERRE.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+A French writer has recently published a careful and interesting volume
+on the famous events which ended in the overthrow of Robespierre and the
+close of the Reign of Terror.[1] These events are known in the historic
+calendar as the Revolution of Thermidor in the Year II. After the fall
+of the monarchy, the Convention decided that the year should begin with
+the autumnal equinox, and that the enumeration should date from the
+birth of the Republic. The Year I. opens on September 22, 1792; the Year
+II. opens on the same day of 1793. The month of Thermidor begins on July
+19. The memorable Ninth Thermidor therefore corresponds to July 27,
+1794. This has commonly been taken as the date of the commencement of a
+counter-revolution, and in one sense it was so. Comte, however, and
+others have preferred to fix the reaction at the execution of Danton
+(April 5, 1794), or Robespierre's official proclamation of Deism in the
+Festival of the Supreme Being (May 7, 1794).
+
+[Footnote 1: _La Révolution de Thermidor_. Par Ch. D'Héricault. Paris:
+Didier, 1876.]
+
+M. D'Héricault does not belong to the school of writers who treat the
+course of history as a great high road, following a firmly traced line,
+and set with plain and ineffaceable landmarks. The French Revolution has
+nearly always been handled in this way, alike by those who think it
+fruitful in blessings, and by their adversaries, who pronounce it a
+curse inflicted by the wrath of Heaven. Historians have looked at the
+Revolution as a plain landsman looks at the sea. To the landsman the
+ocean seems one huge immeasurable flood, obeying a simple law of ebb and
+flow, and offering to the navigator a single uniform force. Yet in truth
+we know that the oceanic movement is the product of many forces; the
+seeming uniformity covers the energy of a hundred currents and
+counter-currents; the sea-floor is not even nor the same, but is subject
+to untold conditions of elevation and subsidence; the sea is not one
+mass, but many masses moving along definite lines of their own. It is
+the same with the great tides of history. Wise men shrink from summing
+them up in single propositions. That the French Revolution led to an
+immense augmentation of happiness, both for the French and for mankind,
+can only be denied by the Pope. That it secured its beneficent results
+untempered by any mixture of evil, can only be maintained by men as mad
+as Doctor Pangloss. The Greek poetess Corinna said to the youthful
+Pindar, when he had interwoven all the gods and goddesses in the Theban
+mythology into a single hymn, that we should sow with the hand and not
+with the sack. Corinna's monition to the singer is proper to the
+interpreter of historical truth: he should cull with the hand, and not
+sweep in with the scythe. It is doubtless mere pedantry to abstain from
+the widest conception of the sum of a great movement. A clear, definite,
+and stable idea of the meaning in the history of human progress of such
+vast groups of events as the Reformation or the Revolution, is
+indispensable for any one to whom history is a serious study of society.
+It is just as important, however, not to forget that they were really
+groups of events, and not in either case a single uniform movement. The
+World-Epos is after all only a file of the morning paper in a state of
+glorification. A sensible man learns, in everyday life, to abstain from
+praising and blaming character by wholesale; he becomes content to say
+of this trait that it is good, and of that act that it was bad. So in
+history, we become unwilling to join or to admire those who insist upon
+transferring their sentiment upon the whole to their judgment upon each
+part. We seek to be allowed to retain a decided opinion as to the final
+value to mankind of a long series of transactions, and yet not to commit
+ourselves to set the same estimate on each transaction in particular,
+still less on each person associated with it. Why shall we not prize the
+general results of the Reformation, without being obliged to defend John
+of Leyden and the Munster Anabaptists?
+
+M. D'Héricault's volume naturally suggests such reflections as these. Of
+all the men of the Revolution, Robespierre has suffered most from the
+audacious idolatry of some writers, and the splenetic impatience of
+others. M. Louis Blanc and M. Ernest Hamel talk of him as an angel or a
+prophet, and the Ninth Thermidor is a red day indeed in their
+martyrology. Michelet and M. D'Héricault treat him as a mixture of
+Cagliostro and Caligula, both a charlatan and a miscreant. We are
+reminded of the commencement of an address of the French Senate to the
+first Bonaparte: 'Sire,' they began, 'the desire for perfection is one
+of the worst maladies that can afflict the human mind.' This bold
+aphorism touches one of the roots of the judgments we pass both upon men
+and events. It is because people so irrationally think fit to insist
+upon perfection, that Robespierre's admirers would fain deny that he
+ever had a fault, and the tacit adoption of the same impracticable
+standard makes it easier for Robespierre's wholesale detractors to deny
+that he had a single virtue or performed a single service. The point of
+view is essentially unfit for history. The real subject of history is
+the improvement of social arrangements, and no conspicuous actor in
+public affairs since the world began saw the true direction of
+improvement with an absolutely unerring eye from the beginning of his
+career to the end. It is folly for the historian, as it is for the
+statesman, to strain after the imaginative unity of the dramatic
+creator. Social progress is an affair of many small pieces and slow
+accretions, and the interest of historic study lies in tracing, amid the
+immense turmoil of events and through the confusion of voices, the
+devious course of the sacred torch, as it shifts from bearer to bearer.
+And it is not the bearers who are most interesting, but the torch.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the old Flemish town of Arras, known in the diplomatic history of the
+fifteenth century by a couple of important treaties, and famous in the
+industrial history of the Middle Ages for its pre-eminence in the
+manufacture of the most splendid kind of tapestry hangings, Maximilian
+Robespierre was born in May 1758. He was therefore no more than five and
+thirty years old when he came to his ghastly end in 1794. His father was
+a lawyer, and, though the surname of the family had the prefix of
+nobility, they belonged to the middle class. When this decorative prefix
+became dangerous, Maximilian Derobespierre dropped it. His great rival,
+Danton, was less prudent or less fortunate, and one of the charges made
+against him was that he had styled himself Monsieur D'Anton.
+
+Robespierre's youth was embittered by sharp misfortune. His mother died
+when he was only seven years old, and his father had so little courage
+under the blow that he threw up his practice, deserted his children, and
+died in purposeless wanderings through Germany. The burden that the weak
+and selfish throw down, must be taken up by the brave. Friendly
+kinsfolk charged themselves with the maintenance of the four orphans.
+Maximilian was sent to the school of the town, whence he proceeded with
+a sizarship to the college of Louis-le-Grand in Paris. He was an apt and
+studious pupil, but austere, and disposed to that sombre cast of spirits
+which is common enough where a lad of some sensibility and much
+self-esteem finds himself stamped with a badge of social inferiority.
+Robespierre's worshippers love to dwell on his fondness for birds: with
+the universal passion of mankind for legends of the saints, they tell
+how the untimely death of a favourite pigeon afflicted him with anguish
+so poignant, that, even sixty long years after, it made his sister's
+heart ache to look back upon the pain of that tragic moment. Always a
+sentimentalist, Robespierre was from boyhood a devout enthusiast for the
+great high priest of the sentimental tribe. Rousseau was then passing
+the last squalid days of his life among the meadows and woods at
+Ermenonville. Robespierre, who could not have been more than twenty at
+the time, for Rousseau died in the summer of 1778, is said to have gone
+on a reverential pilgrimage in search of an oracle from the lonely sage,
+as Boswell and as Gibbon and a hundred others had gone before him.
+Rousseau was wont to use his real adorers as ill as he used his
+imaginary enemies. Robespierre may well have shared the discouragement
+of the enthusiastic father who informed Rousseau that he was about to
+bring up his son on the principles of _Emilius_. 'Then so much the
+worse,' cried the perverse philosopher, 'both for you and your son.' If
+he had been endowed with second sight, he would have thought at least as
+rude a presage due to this last and most ill-starred of a whole
+generation of neophytes.
+
+In 1781 Robespierre returned to Arras, and amid the welcome of his
+relatives and the good hopes of friends began the practice of an
+advocate. For eight years he led an active and seemly life. He was not
+wholly pure from that indiscretion of the young appetite, about which
+the world is mute, but whose better ordering and governance would give a
+diviner brightness to the earth. Still, if he did not escape the ordeal
+of youth, Robespierre was frugal, laborious, and persevering. His
+domestic amiability made him the delight of his sister, and his zealous
+self-sacrifice for the education and advancement in life of his younger
+brother was afterwards repaid by Augustin Robespierre's devotion through
+all the fierce and horrible hours of Thermidor. Though cold in
+temperament, extremely reserved in manners, and fond of industrious
+seclusion, Robespierre did not disdain the social diversions of the
+town. He was a member of a reunion of Rosati, who sang madrigals and
+admired one another's bad verses. Those who love the ironical surprises
+of fate, may picture the young man who was doomed to play so terrible a
+part in terrible affairs, going through the harmless follies of a
+ceremonial reception by the Rosati, taking three deep breaths over a
+rose, solemnly fastening the emblem to his coat, emptying a glass of
+rose-red wine at a draught to the good health of the company, and
+finally reciting couplets that Voltaire would have found almost as
+detestable as the Law of Prairial or the Festival of the Supreme Being.
+More laudable efforts of ambition were prize essays, in which
+Robespierre has the merit of taking the right side in important
+questions. He protested against the inhumanity of laws that inflicted
+civil infamy upon the innocent family of a convicted criminal. And he
+protested against the still more horrid cruelty which reduced
+unfortunate children born out of wedlock to something like the status of
+the mediæval serf. Robespierre's compositions at this time do not rise
+above the ordinary level of declaiming mediocrity, but they promised a
+manhood of benignity and enlightenment. To compose prize essays on
+political reforms was better than to ignore or to oppose political
+reform. But the course of events afterwards owed their least desirable
+bias to the fact that such compositions were the nearest approach to
+political training that so many of the revolutionary leaders underwent.
+One is inclined to apply to practical politics Arthur Young's sensible
+remark about the endeavour of the French to improve the quality of their
+wool: 'A cultivator at the head of a sheep-farm of 3000 or 4000 acres,
+would in a few years do more for their wools than all the academicians
+and philosophers will effect in ten centuries.'
+
+In his profession he distinguished himself in one or two causes of local
+celebrity. An innovating citizen had been ordered by the authorities to
+remove a lightning-conductor from his house within three days, as being
+a mischievous practical paradox, as well as a danger and an annoyance to
+his neighbours. Robespierre pleaded the innovator's case on appeal, and
+won it. He defended a poor woman who had been wrongfully accused by a
+monk belonging to the powerful corporation of a great neighbouring
+abbey. The young advocate did not even shrink from manfully arguing a
+case against the august Bishop of Arras himself. His independence did
+him no harm. The Bishop afterwards appointed him to the post of judge or
+legal assessor in the episcopal court. This tribunal was a remnant of
+what had once been the sovereign authority and jurisdiction of the
+Bishops of Arras. That a court with the power of life and death should
+thus exist by the side of a proper corporation of civil magistrates, is
+an illustration of the inextricable labyrinth of the French law and its
+administration on the eve of the Revolution. Robespierre did not hold
+his office long. Every one has heard the striking story, how the young
+judge, whose name was within half a dozen years to take a place in the
+popular mind of France and of Europe with the bloodiest monsters of myth
+or history, resigned his post in a fit of remorse after condemning a
+murderer to be executed. 'He is a criminal, no doubt,' Robespierre kept
+groaning in reply to the consolations of his sister, for women are more
+positive creatures than men: 'a criminal, no doubt; but to put a man to
+death!' Many a man thus begins the great voyage with queasy
+sensibilities, and ends it a cannibal.
+
+Among Robespierre's associates in the festive mummeries of the Rosati
+was a young officer of Engineers, who was destined to be his colleague
+in the dread Committee of Public Safety, and to leave an important name
+in French history. In the garrison of Arras, Carnot was quartered,--that
+iron head, whose genius for the administrative organisation of war
+achieved even greater things for the new republic than the genius of
+Louvois had achieved for the old monarchy. Carnot surpassed not only
+Louvois, but perhaps all other names save one in modern military
+history, by uniting to the most powerful gifts for organisation, both
+the strategic talent that planned the momentous campaign of 1794, and
+the splendid personal energy and skill that prolonged the defence of
+Antwerp against the allied army in 1814 Partisans dream of the
+unrivalled future of peace, glory, and freedom that would have fallen to
+the lot of France, if only the gods had brought about a hearty union
+between the military genius of Carnot and the political genius of
+Robespierre. So, no doubt, after the restoration of Charles II. in
+England, there were good men who thought that all would have gone very
+differently, if only the genius of the great creator of the Ironsides
+had taken counsel with the genius of Venner, the Fifth-Monarchy Man, and
+Feak, the Anabaptist prophet.
+
+The time was now come when such men as Robespierre were to be tried with
+fire, when they were to drink the cup of fury and the dregs of the cup
+of trembling. Sybils and prophets have already spoken their inexorable
+decree, as Goethe has said, on the day that first gives the man to the
+world; no time and no might can break the stamped mould of his
+character; only as life wears on, do all its aforeshapen lines come into
+light. He is launched into a sea of external conditions, that are as
+independent of his own will as the temperament with which he confronts
+them. It is action that tries, and variation of circumstance. The leaden
+chains of use bind many an ugly unsuspected prisoner in the soul; and
+when the habit of their lives has been sundered, the most immaculate are
+capable of antics beyond prevision. A great crisis of the world was
+prepared for Robespierre and those others, his allies or his destroyers,
+who with him came like the lightning and went like the wind.
+
+At the end of 1788 the King of France found himself forced to summon the
+States-General. It was their first assembly since 1614. On the memorable
+Fourth of May, 1789, Robespierre appeared at Versailles as one of the
+representatives of the third estate of his native province of Artois.
+The excitement and enthusiasm of the elections to this renowned
+assembly, the immense demands and boundless expectations that they
+disclosed, would have warned a cool observer of events, if in that
+heated air a cool observer could have been found, that the hour had
+struck for the fulfilment of those grim apprehensions of revolution that
+had risen in the minds of many shrewd men, good and bad, in the course
+of the previous half century. No great event in history ever comes
+wholly unforeseen. The antecedent causes are so wide-reaching, many, and
+continuous, that their direction is always sure to strike the eye of one
+or more observers in all its significance. Lewis the Fifteenth, whose
+invincible weariness and heavy disgust veiled a penetrating discernment,
+measured accurately the scope of the conflict between the crown and the
+parlements: but, said he, things as they are will last my time. Under
+the roof of his own palace at Versailles, in the apartment of Madame de
+Pompadour's famous physician, one of Quesnai's economic disciples had
+cried out, 'The realm is in a sore way; it will never be cured without a
+great internal commotion; but woe to those who have to do with it; into
+such work the French go with no slack hand.' Rousseau, in a passage in
+the Confessions, not only divines a speedy convulsion, but with striking
+practical sagacity enumerates the political and social causes that were
+unavoidably drawing France to the edge of the abyss. Lord Chesterfield,
+so different a man from Rousseau, declared as early as 1752, that he saw
+in France every symptom that history had taught him to regard as the
+forerunner of deep change; before the end of the century, so his
+prediction ran, both the trade of king and the trade of priest in France
+would be shorn of half their glory. D'Argenson in the same year declared
+a revolution inevitable, and with a curious precision of anticipation
+assured himself that if once the necessity arose of convoking the
+States-General, they would not assemble in vain: _qu'on y prenne, garde!
+ils seraient fort sérieux!_ Oliver Goldsmith, idly wandering through
+France, towards 1755, discerned in the mutinous attitude of the judicial
+corporations, that the genius of freedom was entering the kingdom in
+disguise, and that a succession of three weak monarchs would end in the
+emancipation of the people of France. The most touching of all these
+presentiments is to be found in a private letter of the great Empress,
+the mother of Marie Antoinette herself. Maria Theresa describes the
+ruined state of the French monarchy, and only prays that if it be doomed
+to ruin still more utter, at least the blame may not fall upon her
+daughter. The Empress had not learnt that when the giants of social
+force are advancing from the sombre shadow of the past, with the thunder
+and the hurricane in their hands, our poor prayers are of no more avail
+than the unbodied visions of a dream.
+
+The old popular assembly of the realm was not resorted to before every
+means of dispensing with so drastic a remedy had been tried. Historians
+sometimes write as if Turgot were the only able and reforming minister
+of the century. God forbid that we should put any other minister on a
+level with that high and beneficent figure. But Turgot was not the first
+statesman, both able and patriotic, who had been disgraced for want of
+compliance with the conditions of success at court; he was only the last
+of a series. Chauvelin, a man of vigour and capacity, was dismissed
+with ignominy in 1736. Machault, a reformer, at once courageous and
+wise, shared the same fate twenty years later; and in his case
+revolution was as cruel and as heedless as reaction, for, at the age of
+ninety-one, the old man was dragged, blind and deaf, before the
+revolutionary tribunal and thence despatched to the guillotine. Between
+Chauvelin and Machault, the elder D'Argenson, who was greater than
+either of them, had been raised to power, and then speedily hurled down
+from it (1747), for no better reason than that his manners were uncouth,
+and that he would not waste his time in frivolities that were as the
+breath of life in the great gallery at Versailles and on the
+smooth-shaven lawns of Fontainebleau.
+
+Not only had wise counsellors been tried; consultative assemblies had
+been tried also. Necker had been dismissed in 1781, after publishing the
+memorable Report which first initiated the nation in the elements of
+financial knowledge. The disorder waxed greater, and the monarchy drew
+nearer to bankruptcy each year. The only modern parallel to the state of
+things in France under Lewis the Sixteenth is to be sought in the state
+of things in Egypt or in Turkey. Lewis the Fourteenth had left a debt of
+between two and three thousand millions of livres, but this had been
+wiped out by the heroic operations of Law; operations, by the way, which
+have never yet been scientifically criticised. But the debt soon grew
+again, by foolish wars, by the prodigality of the court, and by the
+rapacity of the nobles. It amounted in 1789 to something like two
+hundred and forty millions sterling; and it is interesting to notice
+that this was exactly the sum of the public debt of Great Britain at the
+same time. The year's excess of expenditure over receipts in 1774 was
+about fifty millions of livres: in 1787 it was one hundred and forty
+millions, or according to a different computation even two hundred
+millions. The material case was not at all desperate, if only the court
+had been less infatuated, and the spirit of the privileged orders had
+been less blind and less vile. The fatality of the situation lay in the
+characters of a handful of men and women. For France was abundant in
+resources, and even at this moment was far from unprosperous, in spite
+of the incredible trammels of law and custom. An able financier, with
+the support of a popular chamber and the assent of the sovereign, could
+have had no difficulty in restoring the public credit. But the
+conditions, simple as they might seem to a patriot or to posterity, were
+unattainable so long as power remained with a caste that were anything
+we please except patriots. An Assembly of Notables was brought together,
+but it was only the empty phantasm of national representation. Yet the
+situation was so serious that even this body, of arbitrary origin as it
+was, still was willing to accept vital reforms. The privileged order,
+who were then as their descendants are now, the worst conservative party
+in Europe, immediately persuaded the magisterial corporation to resist
+the Notables. The judicial corporation or Parlement of Paris had been
+suppressed under Lewis the Fifteenth, and unfortunately revived again at
+the accession of his grandson. By the inconvenient constitution of the
+French government, the assent of that body was indispensable to fiscal
+legislation, on the ground that such legislation was part of the general
+police of the realm. The king's minister, now Loménie de Brienne,
+devised a new judicial constitution. But the churchmen, the nobles, and
+the lawyers all united in protestations against such a blow. The common
+people are not always the best judges of a remedy for the evils under
+which they are the greatest sufferers, and they broke out in disorder
+both in Paris and the provinces. They discerned an attack upon their
+local independence. Nobody would accept office in the new courts, and
+the administration of justice was at a standstill. A loan was thrown
+upon the market, but the public could not be persuaded to take it up. It
+was impossible to collect the taxes. The interest on the national debt
+was unpaid, and the fundholder was dismayed and exasperated by an
+announcement that only two-fifths would be discharged in cash. A very
+large part of the national debt was held in the form of annuities for
+lives, and men who had invested their savings on the credit of the
+government, saw themselves left without a provision. The total number of
+fundholders cannot be ascertained with any precision, but it must have
+been very considerable, especially in Paris and the other great cities.
+Add to these all the civil litigants in the kingdom, who had portions of
+their property virtually sequestrated by the suspension of the courts
+into which the property had been taken. The resentment of this immense
+body of defrauded public creditors and injured private suitors explains
+the alienation of the middle class from the monarchy. In the convulsions
+of our own time, the moneyed interests have been on one side, and the
+population without money on the other. But in the first and greatest
+convulsion, those who had nothing to lose found their animosities shared
+by those who had had something to lose, and had lost it.
+
+Deliberative assemblies, then, had been tried, and ministers had been
+tried; both had failed, and there was no other device left, except one
+which was destructive to absolute monarchy. Lewis the Sixteenth was in
+1789 in much the same case as that of the King of England in 1640.
+Charles had done his best to raise money without any parliament for
+twelve years: he had lost patience with the Short Parliament; finally,
+he was driven without choice or alternative to face as he best could the
+stout resolution and the wise patriotism of the Long Parliament. Men
+sometimes wonder how it was that Lewis, when he came to find the
+National Assembly unmanageable, and discovering how rapidly he was
+drifting towards the thunders of the revolutionary cataract, did not
+break up a Chamber over which neither the court, nor even a minister so
+popular as Necker, had the least control. It is a question whether the
+sword would not have broken in his hand. Even supposing, however, that
+the army would have consented to a violent movement against the
+Assembly, the King would still have been left in the same desperate
+straits from which he had looked to the States-General to extricate him.
+He might perhaps have dispersed the Assembly; he could not disperse debt
+and deficit. Those monsters would have haunted him as implacably as
+ever. There was no new formula of exorcism, nor any untried enchantment.
+The success of violent designs against the National Assembly, had
+success been possible, could, after all, have been followed by no other
+consummation than the relapse of France into the raging anarchy of
+Poland, or the sullen decrepitude of Turkey.
+
+This will seem to some persons no better than fatalism. But, in truth,
+there are two popular ways of reading the history of events between 1789
+and 1794, and each of them seems to us as bad as the other. According to
+one, whatever happened in the Revolution was good and admirable, because
+it happened. According to the other, something good and admirable was
+always attainable, and, if only bad men had not interposed, always ready
+to happen. Of course, the only sensible view is that many of the
+revolutionary solutions were detestable, but no other solution was
+within reach. This is undoubtedly the best of possible worlds; if the
+best is not so good as we could wish, that is the fault of the
+possibilities. Such a doctrine is neither fatalism nor optimism, but an
+honest recognition of long chains of cause and effect in human affairs.
+
+The great gathering of chosen men was first called States-General; then
+it called itself National Assembly; it is commonly known in history as
+the Constituent Assembly. The name is of ironical association, for the
+constitution which it framed after much travail endured for no more than
+a few months. Its deliberations lasted from May 1789 until September
+1791. Among its members were three principal groups. There was, first, a
+band of blind adherents of the old system of government with all or most
+of its abuses. Second, there was a Centre of timid and one-eyed men, who
+were for transforming the old absolutist system into something that
+should resemble the constitution of our own country. Finally, there was
+a Left, with some differences of shade, but all agreeing in the
+necessity of a thorough remodelling of every institution and most of the
+usages of the country. 'Silence, you thirty votes!' cried Mirabeau one
+day, when he was interrupted by the dissents of the Mountain. This was
+the original measure of the party that in the twinkling of an eye was to
+wield the destinies of France. In our own time we have wondered at the
+rapidity with which a Chamber that was one day on the point of bringing
+back the grandnephew of Lewis the Sixteenth, found itself a little later
+voting that Republic which has since been ratified by the nation, and
+has at this moment the ardent good wishes of every enlightened
+politician in Europe. In the same way it is startling to think that
+within three years of the beheading of Lewis the Sixteenth, there was
+probably not one serious republican in the representative assembly of
+France. Yet it is always so. We might make just the same remark of the
+House of Commons at Westminster in 1640, and of the Assembly of
+Massachusetts or of New York as late as 1770. The final flash of a long
+unconscious train of thought or intent is ever a surprise and a shock.
+It is a mistake to set these swift changes down to political levity;
+they were due rather to quickness of political intuition. It was the
+King's attempt at flight in the summer of 1791 that first created a
+republican party. It was that unhappy exploit, and no theoretical
+preferences, that awoke France to the necessity of choosing between the
+sacrifice of monarchy and the restoration of territorial aristocracy.
+
+Political intuition was never one of Robespierre's conspicuous gifts.
+But he had a doctrine that for a certain time served the same purpose.
+Rousseau had kindled in him a fervid democratic enthusiasm, and had
+penetrated his mind with the principle of the Sovereignty of the People.
+This famous dogma contained implicitly within it the more indisputable
+truth that a society ought to be regulated with a view to the happiness
+of the people. Such a principle made it easier for Robespierre to
+interpret rightly the first phases of the revolutionary movement. It
+helped him to discern that the concentrated physical force of the
+populace was the only sure protection against a civil war. And if a
+civil war had broken out in 1789, instead of 1793, all the advantages of
+authority would have been against the popular party. The first
+insurrection of Paris is associated with the harangue of Camille
+Desmoulins at the Palais Royal, with the fall of the Bastille, with the
+murder of the governor, and a hundred other scenes of melodramatic
+horror and the blood-red picturesque. The insurrection of the Fourteenth
+of July 1789 taught Robespierre a lesson of practical politics, which
+exactly fitted in with his previous theories. In his resentment against
+the oppressive disorder of monarchy and feudalism, he had accepted the
+counter principle that the people can do no wrong, and nobody of sense
+now doubts that in their first great act the people of Paris did what
+was right. Six days after the fall of the Bastille, the Centre were for
+issuing a proclamation denouncing popular violence and ordering rigorous
+vigilance. Robespierre was then so little known in the Assembly that
+even his name was usually misspelt in the journals. From his obscure
+bench on the Mountain he cried out with bitter vehemence against the
+proposed proclamation:--'Revolt! But this revolt is liberty. The battle
+is not at its end. Tomorrow, it may be, the shameful designs against us
+will be renewed; and who will there then be to repulse them, if
+beforehand we declare the very men to be rebels, who have rushed to
+arms for our protection and safety?' This was the cardinal truth of the
+situation. Everybody knows Mirabeau's saying about Robespierre:--'That
+man will go far: he believes every word that he says!' This is much, but
+it is only half. It is not only that the man of power believes what he
+says; what he believes must fit in with the facts and with the demands
+of the time. Now Robespierre's firmness of conviction happened at this
+stage to be rightly matched by his clearness of sight.
+
+It is true that a passionate mob, its unearthly admixture of laughter
+with fury, of vacancy with deadly concentration, is as terrible as some
+uncouth antediluvian, or the unfamiliar monsters of the sea, or one of
+the giant plants that make men shudder with mysterious fear. The history
+of our own country in the eighteenth century tells of the riots against
+meeting-houses in Doctor Sacheverell's time, and the riots against
+papists and their abettors in Lord George Gordon's time, and
+Church-and-King riots in Doctor Priestley's time. It would be too
+daring, therefore, to maintain that the rabble of the poor have any more
+unerring political judgment than the rabble of the opulent. But, in
+France in 1789, Robespierre was justified in saying that revolt meant
+liberty. If there had been no revolt in July, the court party would have
+had time to mature their infatuated designs of violence against the
+Assembly. In October these designs had come to life again. The royalists
+at Versailles had exultant banquets, at which, in the presence of the
+Queen, they drank confusion to all patriots, and trampled the new emblem
+of freedom passionately underfoot. The news of this odious folly soon
+travelled to Paris. Its significance was speedily understood by a
+populace whose wits were sharpened by famine. Thousands of fire-eyed
+women and men tramped intrepidly out towards Versailles. If they had
+done less, the Assembly would have been dispersed or arbitrarily
+decimated, even though such a measure would certainly have left the
+government in desperation.
+
+At that dreadful moment of the Sixth of October, amid the slaughter of
+guards and the frantic yells of hatred against the Queen, it is no
+wonder that some were found to urge the King to flee to Metz. If he had
+accepted the advice, the course of the Revolution would have been
+different; but its march would have been just as irresistible, for
+revolution lay in the force of a hundred combined circumstances. Lewis,
+however, rejected these counsels, and suffered the mob to carry him in
+bewildering procession to his capital and his prison. That great man who
+was watching French affairs with such consuming eagerness from distant
+Beaconsfield in our English Buckinghamshire, instantly divined that this
+procession from Versailles to the Tuileries marked the fall of the
+monarchy. 'A revolution in sentiment, manners, and moral opinions, the
+most important of all revolutions in a word,' was in Burke's judgment to
+be dated from the Sixth of October 1789.
+
+The events of that day did, indeed, give its definite cast to the
+situation. The moral authority of the sovereign came to an end, along
+with the ancient and reverend mystery of the inviolability of his
+person. The Count d'Artois, the King's second brother, one of the most
+worthless of human beings, as incurably addicted to sinister and
+suicidal counsels in 1789 as he was when he overthrew his own throne
+forty years later, had run away from peril and from duty after the
+insurrection of July. After the insurrection of October, a troop of the
+nobles of the court followed him. The personal cowardice of the
+Emigrants was only matched by their political blindness. Many of the
+most unwise measures in the Assembly were only passed by small
+majorities, and the majorities would have been transformed into
+minorities, if in the early days of the Revolution these unworthy men
+had only stood firm at their posts. Selfish oligarchies have scarcely
+ever been wanting in courage. The emigrant noblesse of France are almost
+the only instance of a great privileged and territorial caste that had
+as little bravery as they had patriotism. The explanation is that they
+had been an oligarchy, not of power or duty, but of self-indulgence.
+They were crushed by Richelieu to secure the unity of the monarchy. They
+now effaced themselves at the Revolution, and this secured that far
+greater object, the unity of the nation.
+
+The disappearance of so many of the nobles from France was not the only
+abdication on the part of the conservative powers. Cowed and terrified
+by the events of October, no less than three hundred members of the
+Assembly sought to resign. The average attendance even at the most
+important sittings was often incredibly small. Thus the Chamber came to
+have little more moral authority in face of the people of Paris than had
+the King himself. The people of Paris had themselves become in a day the
+masters of France.
+
+This immense change led gradually to a decisive alteration in the
+position of Robespierre. He found the situation of affairs at last
+falling into perfect harmony with his doctrine. Rousseau had taught him
+that the people ought to be sovereign, and now the people were being
+recognised as sovereign _de facto_ no less than _de jure_. Any
+limitations on the new divine right united the horror of blasphemy to
+the secular wickedness of political treason. After the Assembly had come
+to Paris, a famishing mob in a moment of mad fury murdered an
+unfortunate baker, who was suspected of keeping back bread. These
+paroxysms led to the enactment of a new martial law. Robespierre spoke
+vehemently against it; such a law implied a wrongful distrust of the
+people. Then discussions followed as to the property qualification of an
+elector. Citizens were classed as active and passive. Only those were to
+have votes who paid direct taxes to the amount of three days' wages in
+the year. Robespierre flung himself upon this too famous distinction
+with bitter tenacity. If all men are equal, he cried, then all men
+ought to have votes: if he who only pays the amount of one day's work,
+has fewer rights than another who pays the amount of three days, why
+should not the man who pays ten days have more rights than the other who
+only pays the earnings of three days? This kind of reasoning had little
+weight with the Chamber, but it made the reasoner very popular with the
+throng in the galleries. Even within the Assembly, influence gradually
+came to the man who had a parcel of immutable axioms and postulates, and
+who was ready with a deduction and a phrase for each case as it arose.
+He began to stand out like a needle of sharp rock, amid the flitting
+shadows of uncertain purpose and the vapoury drift of wandering aims.
+
+Robespierre had no social conception, and he had nothing which can be
+described as a policy. He was the prophet of a sect, and had at this
+period none of the aims of the chief of a political party. What he had
+was democratic doctrine, and an intrepid logic. And Robespierre's
+intrepid logic was the nearest approach to calm force and coherent
+character that the first three years of the Revolution brought into
+prominence. When the Assembly met, Necker was the popular idol. Almost
+within a few weeks, this well-meaning, but very incompetent divinity had
+slipped from his throne, and Lafayette had taken his place. Mirabeau
+came next. The ardent and animated genius of his eloquence fitted him
+above all men to ride the whirlwind and direct the storm. And on the
+memorable Twenty-third of June '89, he had shown the genuine audacity
+and resource of a revolutionary statesman, when he stirred the Chamber
+to defy the King's demand, and hailed the royal usher with the
+resounding words:--'You, sir, have neither place nor right of speech. Go
+tell those who sent you that we are here by the will of the people, and
+only bayonets shall drive us hence!' But Mirabeau bore a tainted
+character, and was always distrusted. 'Ah, how the immorality of my
+youth,' he used to say, in words that sum up the tragedy of many a
+puissant life, 'how the immorality of my youth hinders the public good!'
+The event proved that the popular suspicion was just: the patriot is now
+no longer merely suspected, but known, to have sullied his hands with
+the money of the court. He did not sell himself, it has been said; he
+allowed himself to be paid. The distinction was too subtle for men doing
+battle for their lives and for freedom, and Mirabeau's popularity waned
+towards the middle of 1790. The next favourite was Barnave, the generous
+and high-minded spokesman of those sanguine spirits who to the very end
+hoped against hope to save both the throne and its occupant. By the
+spring of 1791 Barnave followed his predecessors into disfavour. The
+Assembly was engaged on the burning question of the government of the
+colonies. Were the negro slaves to be admitted to citizenship, or was a
+legislature of planters to be entrusted with the task of social
+reformation? Our own generation has seen in the republic of the West
+what strife this political difficulty is capable of raising. Barnave
+pronounced against the negroes. Robespierre, on the contrary, declaimed
+against any limitation of the right of the negro, as a compromise with
+the avarice, pride, and cruelty of a governing race, and a guilty
+trafficking with the rights of man. Barnave from that day saw that his
+laurel crown had gone to Robespierre.
+
+If the people 'called him noble that was now their hate, him vile that
+was their garland,' they did not transfer their affections without sound
+reason. Barnave's sensibility was too easily touched. There are many
+politicians in every epoch whose principles grow slack and flaccid at
+the approach of the golden sun of royalty. Barnave was one of those who
+was sent to bring back the fugitive King and Queen from Varennes, and
+the journey by their side in the coach unstrung his spirit. He became
+one of the court's clandestine advisers. Men of this weak susceptibility
+of imagination are not fit for times of revolution. To be on the side of
+the court was to betray the cause of the nation. We cannot take too much
+pains to realise that the voluntary conversion of Lewis the Sixteenth to
+a popular constitution and the abolition of feudalism, was practically
+as impossible as the conversion of Pope Pius the Ninth to the doctrine
+of a free church in a free state. Those who believe in the miracle of
+free will may think of this as they please. Sensible people who accept
+the scientific account of human character, know that the sudden
+transformation of a man or a woman brought up to middle age as the heir
+to centuries of absolutist tradition, into adherents of a government
+that agreed with the doctrines of Locke and Milton, was only possible on
+condition of supernatural interference. The King's good nature was no
+substitute for political capacity or insight. An instructive measure of
+the degree in which he possessed these two qualities may be found in
+that deplorable diary of his, where on such days as the Fourteenth of
+July, when the Bastille fell, and the Sixth of October, when he was
+carried in triumph from Versailles to the Tuileries, he made the simple
+entry, '_Rien_.' And he had no firmness. It was as difficult to keep the
+King to a purpose, La Marck said to Mirabeau, as to keep together a
+number of well-oiled ivory balls. Lewis, moreover, was guided by a more
+energetic and less compliant character than his own.
+
+Marie Antoinette's high mien in adversity, and the contrast between the
+dazzling splendour of her first years and the scenes of outrage and
+bloody death that made the climax of her fate, could not but strike the
+imaginations of men. Such contrasts are the very stuff of which Tragedy,
+the gorgeous muse with scepter'd pall, loves to weave her most imposing
+raiment. But history must be just; and the character of the Queen had
+far more concern in the disaster of the first five years of the
+Revolution than had the character of Robespierre. Every new document
+that comes to light heaps up proof that if blind and obstinate choice
+of personal gratification before the common weal be enough to constitute
+a state criminal, then the Queen of France was one of the worst state
+criminals that ever afflicted a nation. The popular hatred of Marie
+Antoinette sprang from a sound instinct. We shall never know how much or
+how little truth there was in those frightful charges against her, that
+may still be read in a thousand pamphlets. These imputed depravities far
+surpass anything that John Knox ever said against Mary Stuart, or that
+Juvenal has recorded against Messalina; and, perhaps, for the only
+parallel we must look to the hideous stories of the Byzantine secretary
+against Theodora, the too famous empress of Justinian and the persecutor
+of Belisarius. We have to remember that all the revolutionary portraits
+are distorted by furious passion, and that Marie Antoinette may no more
+deserve to be compared to Mary Stuart than Robespierre deserves to be
+compared to Ezzelino or to Alva. The aristocrats were the libellers, if
+libels they were. It is at least certain that, from the unlucky hour
+when the Austrian archduchess crossed the French frontier, a childish
+bride of fourteen, down to the hour when the Queen of France made the
+attempt to recross it in resentful flight one and twenty years
+afterwards, Marie Antoinette was ignorant, unteachable, blind to events
+and deaf to good counsels, a bitter grief to her heroic mother, the evil
+genius of her husband, the despair of her truest advisers, and an
+exceedingly bad friend to the people of France. When Burke had that
+immortal vision of her at Versailles--'just above the horizon,
+decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,
+glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendour and
+joy'--we know from the correspondence between Maria Theresa and her
+minister at Versailles, that what Burke really saw was no divinity, but
+a flighty and troublesome schoolgirl, an accomplice in all the ignoble
+intrigues, and a sharer of all the small busy passions, that convulse
+the insects of a court. The levity that came with her Lorraine blood,
+broke out in incredible dissipations; in indiscreet visits to the masked
+balls at the opera, in midnight parades and mystifications on the
+terrace at Versailles, in insensate gambling. 'The court of France is
+turned into a gaming-hell,' said the Emperor Joseph, the Queen's own
+brother: 'if they do not amend, the revolution will be cruel.' These
+vices or follies were less mischievous than her intervention in affairs
+of state. Here her levity was as marked as in the paltry affairs of the
+boudoir and the ante-chamber, and here to levity she added both
+dissimulation and vindictiveness. It was the Queen's influence that
+procured the dismissal of the two virtuous ministers by whose aid the
+King was striving to arrest the decay of the government of his kingdom.
+Malesherbes was distasteful to her for no better reason than that she
+wanted his post for some favourite's favourite. Against Turgot she
+conspired with tenacious animosity, because he had suppressed a
+sinecure which she designed for a court parasite, and because he would
+not support her caprice on behalf of a worthless creature of her
+faction. These two admirable men were disgraced on the same day. The
+Queen wrote to her mother that she had not meddled in the affair. This
+was a falsehood, for she had even sought to have Turgot thrown into the
+Bastille. 'I am as one dashed to the ground,' cried the great Voltaire,
+now nearing his end. 'Never can we console ourselves for having seen the
+golden age dawn and vanish. My eyes see only death in front of me, now
+that Turgot is gone. The rest of my days must be all bitterness.' What
+hope could there be that the personage who had thus put out the light of
+hope for France in 1776, would welcome that greater flame which was
+kindled in the land in 1789?
+
+When people write hymns of pity for the Queen, we always recall the poor
+woman whom Arthur Young met, as he was walking up a hill to ease his
+horse near Mars-le-Tour. Though the unfortunate creature was only
+twenty-eight, she might have been taken for sixty or seventy, her figure
+was so bent, her face so furrowed and hardened by toil. Her husband, she
+said, had a morsel of land, one cow, and a poor little horse, yet he had
+to pay forty-two pounds of wheat and three chickens to one Seigneur, and
+one hundred and sixty pounds of oats, one chicken, and one franc to
+another, besides very heavy tailles and other taxes; and they had seven
+children. She had heard that 'something was to be done by some great
+folks for such poor ones, but she did not know who nor how, but God send
+us better, for the tailles and the dues grind us to the earth.' It was
+such hapless drudges as this who replenished the Queen's gaming tables
+at Versailles. Thousands of them dragged on the burden of their harassed
+and desperate days, less like men and women than beasts of the field
+wrung and tortured and mercilessly overladen, in order that the Queen
+might gratify her childish passion for diamonds, or lavish money and
+estates on worthless female Polignacs and Lamballes, or kill time at a
+cost of five hundred louis a night at lansquenet and the faro bank. The
+Queen, it is true, was in all this no worse than other dissipated women
+then and since. She did not realise that it was the system to which she
+had stubbornly committed herself, that drove the people of the fields to
+cut their crops green to be baked in the oven, because their hunger
+could not wait; or made them cower whole days in their beds, because
+misery seemed to gnaw them there with a duller fang. That she was
+unconscious of its effect, makes no difference in the real drift of her
+policy; makes no difference in the judgment that we ought to pass upon
+it, nor in the gratitude that is owed to the stern men who rose up to
+consume her and her court with righteous flame. The Queen and the
+courtiers, and the hard-faring woman of Mars-le-Tour, and that whole
+generation, have long been dust and shadow; they have vanished from the
+earth, as if they were no more than the fire-flies that the peasant of
+the Italian poet saw dancing in the vineyard, as he took his evening
+rest on the hillside. They have all fled back into the impenetrable
+shade whence they came; our minds are free; and if social equity is not
+a chimera, Marie Antoinette was the protagonist of the most barbarous
+and execrable of causes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let us return to the shaping of the Constitution, not forgetting that
+its stability was to depend upon the Queen. Robespierre left some
+characteristic marks on the final arrangements. He imposed upon the
+Assembly a motion prohibiting any member of it from accepting office
+under the Crown for a period of four years after the dissolution.
+Robespierre from this time forth constantly illustrated a very singular
+truth; namely, that the most ostentatious faith in humanity in general
+seems always to beget the sharpest distrust of all human beings in
+particular. He proceeded further in the same direction. It was
+Robespierre who persuaded the Chamber to pass a self-denying ordinance.
+All its members were declared ineligible for a seat in the legislature
+that was to replace them. The members of the Right on this occasion went
+with their bitter foes of the Extreme Left, and to both parties have
+been imputed sinister and Machiavellian motives. The Right, aware that
+their own return to the new Assembly was impossible, were delighted to
+reduce the men with whom they had been carrying on incensed battle for
+two long years, to their own obscurity and impotence. Robespierre, on
+the other hand, is accused of a jealous desire to exclude Barnave from
+power. He is accused also of a deliberate intention to weaken the new
+legislature, in order to secure the preponderance of the Parisian clubs.
+There is no evidence that these malignant feelings were in Robespierre's
+mind. The reasons he gave were exactly of the kind that we should have
+expected to weigh with a man of his stamp. There is even a certain truth
+in them, that is not inconsistent with the experience of a parliamentary
+country like our own. To talk, he said, of the transmission of light and
+experience from one assembly to another, was to distrust the public
+spirit. The influence of opinion and the general good grows less, as the
+influence of parliamentary orators grows greater. He had no taste, he
+proceeded with one of his chilly sneers, for that new science which was
+styled the tactics of great assemblies; it was too like intrigue.
+Nothing but truth and reason ought to reign in a legislature. He did not
+like the idea of clever men becoming dominant by skilful tactics, and
+then perpetuating their empire from one assembly to another. He wound up
+his discourse with some theatrical talk about disinterestedness. When he
+sat down, he was greeted with enthusiastic acclamations, such as a few
+months before used to greet the stormful Mirabeau, now wrapped in
+eternal sleep amid the stillness of the new Pantheon. The folly of
+Robespierre's inferences is obvious enough. If only truth and reason
+ought to weigh in a legislature, then it is all the more important not
+to exclude any body of men through whom truth and reason may possibly
+enter. Robespierre had striven hard to remove all restrictions from
+admission to the electoral franchise. He did not see that to limit the
+choice of candidates was in itself the most grievous of all
+restrictions.
+
+The common view has been that the Constitution of 1791 perished because
+its creators were thus disabled from defending the work of their hands.
+This view led to a grave mistake four years later, after Robespierre had
+gone to his grave. The Convention, framing the Constitution of the Year
+III., decided that two-thirds of the existing assembly should keep their
+places, and that only one-third should be popularly elected. This led to
+the revolt of the Thirteenth Vendémiaire, and afterwards to the coup
+d'état of the Eighteenth Fructidor. In that sense, no doubt,
+Robespierre's proposal was the indirect root of much mischief. But it is
+childish to believe that if a hundred of the most prominent members of
+the Constituent had found seats in the new assembly, they would have
+saved the Constitution. Their experience, the loss of which it is the
+fashion to deplore, could have had no application to the strange
+combinations of untoward circumstance that were now rising up with such
+deadly rapidity in every quarter of the horizon, like vast sombre banks
+of impenetrable cloud. Prudence in new cases, as has been somewhere
+said, can do nothing on grounds of retrospect. The work of the
+Constituent was doomed by the very nature of things. Their assumption
+that the Revolution was made, while all France was still torn by fierce
+and unappeasable disputes as to seignorial rights, was one of the most
+striking pieces of self-deception in history. It is told how in the
+eleventh century, when the fervent hosts of the Crusaders tramped across
+Europe on their way to deliver the Holy City from the hands of the
+unbelievers, the wearied children, as they espied each new town that lay
+in their interminable march, cried out with joyful expectation, 'Is not
+this, then, Jerusalem?' So France had set out on a portentous journey,
+little knowing how far off was the end; lightly taking each poor
+halting-place for the deeply longed-for goal; and waxing more fiercely
+disappointed, as each new height that they gained only disclosed yet
+farther and more unattainable horizons. 'Alas,' said Burke, 'they little
+know how many a weary step is to be taken, before they can form
+themselves into a mass which has a true political personality.'
+
+An immense revolution had been effected, but by what force were its
+fruits to be guarded? Each step in the revolution had raised a host of
+irreconcilable enemies. The rights of property, the old and jealous
+associations of local independence, the traditions of personal dignity,
+the relations of the civil to the spiritual power--these were the
+momentous matters about which the lawmakers of the Constituent had
+exercised themselves. The parties of the Chamber had for these two
+years past been laying mine and countermine among the very deepest
+foundations of society. One by one each great corporation of the old
+order had been alienated from the new order. It was inevitable that it
+should be so. Let us look at one or two examples of this. The monarchy
+had imposed administrative centralisation upon France without securing
+national unity. Thus the great provinces that had been slowly added one
+after the other to the monarchy, while becoming members of the same
+kingdom, still retained different institutions and isolated usages. The
+time was now come when France should be France, and its inhabitants
+Frenchmen, and no longer Bretons, Normans, Gascons, Provençals. The
+Assembly by a single decree (1790) redivided the country into
+eighty-three departments. It wiped out at a stroke the separate
+administrations, the separate parlements, the peculiar privileges, and
+even the historic names of the old provinces. We need not dwell on the
+significance of this change here, but will only remark in passing that
+the stubborn disputes from the time of the Regency downwards between the
+Crown and the provincial parlements turned, under other names and in
+other forms, upon this very issue of the unification of the law. The
+Crown was with the progressive party, but it lacked the strength and
+courage to set aside retrograde local sentiment as the Constituent
+Assembly was able to set it aside.
+
+Then this prodigious change in the distribution of government was
+accompanied by no less prodigious a change in the source of power.
+Popular election replaced the old system of territorial privilege and
+aristocratic prerogative. The effect of this vital innovation, followed
+as it was a few months later by a decree abolishing titles and armorial
+bearings, was to complete the estrangement of the old privileged classes
+from the revolutionary movement. All that they had meant to concede was
+the payment of an equal land tax. What was life worth to the noble, if
+common people were to be allowed to wear arms and to command a company
+of foot or a troop of horse; if he was no longer to have thousands of
+acres left waste for the chase; if he was compelled to sue for a vote
+where he had only yesterday reigned as manorial lord; if, in short, he
+was at a stroke to lose all those delights of insolence and vanity which
+had made, not the decoration, but the very substance, of his days?
+
+Nor were the nobles of the sword and the red-heeled slipper the only
+outraged class. The magistracy of the provincial parliaments were
+inflamed with resentment against changes that stripped them of the power
+of exciting against the new government the same factious and
+impracticable spirit with which they had on so many occasions
+embarrassed the old. The clergy were thrown even still more violently
+into opposition. The Assembly, sorely pressed for resources, declared
+the property held by ecclesiastics, amounting to a revenue of not less
+than eight million pounds sterling a year, or double that amount in
+modern values, to be the property of the nation. Talleyrand carried a
+measure decreeing the sale of the ecclesiastical domain. The clergy were
+as intensely irritated as laymen would have been by a similar assertion
+of sovereign right. And their irritation was made still more dangerous
+by the next set of measures against them.
+
+The Assembly withdrew all recognition of Catholicism as the religion of
+the State; monastic vows were abolished, and orders and congregations
+suppressed; the ecclesiastical divisions were made to coincide with the
+civil divisions, a bishop being allotted to each department. What was a
+more important revolution than all, bishops and incumbents were
+henceforth to be appointed by popular election. The Assembly, who had
+always the institutions of our own country before them, meant to
+introduce into France the system of the Church of England, which was
+even then an anachronism in the land of its birth; much worse was such a
+system an anachronism, after belief had been sapped by a Voltaire and an
+Encyclopædia. The clergy both showed and excited a mutinous spirit. The
+Assembly, by way of retort, decreed that all ecclesiastics should take
+the oath of allegiance to the civil constitution of the clergy, on pain
+of forfeiture of their benefices. Five-sixths of the clergy refused, and
+the result was an outbreak of religious fury in the great towns of the
+south and elsewhere, which recalled the violence of the sixteenth
+century and the Reformation.
+
+Thus when the Constituent Assembly ceased from its labours, the popular
+party had to face the mocking and defiant privileged classes; the
+magistracy, whose craft and calling were gone; and the clergy and as
+many of the flocks as shared the holy vindictiveness of their pastors.
+Immense material improvements had been made, but who was to guard them
+against all these powerful and exasperated bands? No chamber could
+execute so portentous an office, least of all a chamber that was bound
+to work in accord with a King, who at the very moment when he was
+swearing fidelity to the new order of things, was sending entreaties to
+the King of Prussia and to the Emperor, his brother-in-law, to overthrow
+the new order and bring back the old. If the Revolution had achieved
+priceless gains for France, they could only be preserved on condition
+that public action was directed by those who valued these gains for
+themselves and for their children above all things else--above the
+monarchy, above the constitution, above peace, above their own sorry
+lives. There was only one party who showed this passionate devotion,
+this fanatical resolution not to suffer the work that had been done to
+be undone, and never to allow France to sink back from exalted national
+life into the lethargy of national death. That party was the Jacobins,
+and, above all, the austere and rigorous Jacobins of Paris. On their
+ascendancy depended the triumph of the Revolution, and on the triumph of
+the Revolution depended the salvation of France. Their ascendancy meant
+a Jacobin dictatorship, and against this, as against dictatorship in all
+its forms, many things have been said, and truly said. But the one most
+important thing that can be said about Jacobin dictatorship is that, in
+spite of all the dolorous mishaps and hateful misdeeds that marked its
+course, it was still the only instrument capable of concentrating and
+utilising the dispersed social energy of the French people. The crisis
+was not a crisis of logic but of force, and the Jacobins alone
+understood, as the old Covenanters had understood, that problems of
+force are not solved by phrases, but by mastery and the sword.
+
+The great popular club of Paris was the centre of all those who looked
+at events in this spirit. The Legislative Assembly, the successor of the
+Constituent, met in the month of October 1791. Like its predecessor, the
+Legislative contained a host of excellent and patriotic men, and they at
+once applied themselves to the all-important task, which the Constituent
+had left so deplorably incomplete, of finally breaking down the old
+feudal rights. The most important group in the new chamber were the
+deputies from the Gironde. Events soon revealed violent dissents between
+the Girondins and the Jacobins, but, for some months after the meeting
+of the Legislative, Girondins and Jacobins represented together in
+unbroken unity the great popular party. From this time until the fall of
+the monarchy, the whole of this popular party in all its branches found
+their rallying-place, not in the Assembly, but in the Jacobin Club; and
+the ascendancy of the Jacobin Club embodied the dictatorship of Paris.
+It was only from Paris that the whole circle of events could be
+commanded. When the peasants had got what they wanted, that is to say
+the emancipation of the land, they were ready to think that the
+Revolution was in safety and at an end. They were in no position to see
+the enmity of the exiles, the dangerous selfishness of Austria and
+Prussia, the disloyal machinations of the court, the reactionary
+sentiment of La Vendée, the absolute unworkableness of the new
+constitution. Arthur Young, in the height of the agitations of the
+Constituent Assembly, found himself at Moulins, the capital of the
+Bourbonnais, and on the great post-road to Italy. He went to the best
+coffee-house in the town, and found as many as twenty tables spread for
+company, but as for a newspaper, he says he might as well have asked for
+an elephant. In the capital of a great province, the seat of an
+intendant, at a moment like that, with a National Assembly voting a
+revolution, and not a newspaper to tell the people whether Fayette,
+Mirabeau, or Lewis XVI. were on the throne! Could such a people as this,
+he cries, ever have made a revolution or become free? 'Never in a
+thousand centuries: the enlightened mob of Paris have done the whole.'
+And that was the plain truth. What was involved in such a truth, we
+shall see presently.
+
+Robespierre had now risen to be one of the foremost men in France. To
+borrow the figure of an older chief of French faction, from trifling
+among the violins in the orchestra, he had ascended to the stage itself,
+and had a right to perform leading parts. Disqualified for sitting in
+the Assembly, he wielded greater power than ever in the Club. The
+Constituent had been full of his enemies. 'Alone with my own soul,' he
+once cried to the Jacobins, 'how could I have borne struggles that were
+beyond any human strength, if I had not raised my spirit to God?' This
+isolation marked him with a kind of theocratic distinction. These
+communings with the unseen powers gave a certain indefinable prerogative
+to a man, even among the children of the century of Voltaire. Condorcet,
+the youngest of the intimates and disciples of Voltaire, of D'Alembert,
+of Turgot, was the first to sound bitter warning that Robespierre was at
+heart a priest. The suggestion was more than a gibe. Robespierre had the
+typic sacerdotal temperament, its sense of personal importance, its thin
+unction, its private leanings to the stake and the cord; and he had one
+of those deplorable natures that seem as if they had never in their
+lives known the careless joys of a springtime. By and by, from mere
+priest he developed into the deadlier carnivore, the Inquisitor.
+
+The absence of advantages of bodily presence has never been fatal to the
+pretensions of the pontiff. Robespierre was only a couple of inches
+above five feet in height, but the Grand Monarch himself was hardly
+more. His eyes were small and weak, and he usually wore spectacles; his
+face was pitted by the marks of small-pox; his complexion was dull and
+sometimes livid; the tones of his voice were dry and shrill; and he
+spoke with the vulgar accent of his province. Such is the accepted
+tradition, and there is no reason to dissent from it. It is fair,
+however, to remember that Robespierre's enemies had command of his
+historic reputation at its source, and this is always a great advantage
+for faction, if not for truth. So Robespierre's voice and person may
+have been maligned, just as Aristophanes may have been a calumniator
+when he accused Cleon of having an intolerably loud voice and smelling
+of the tanyard. What is certain is that Robespierre was a master of
+effective oratory adapted for a violent popular audience, to impress, to
+persuade, and to command. The Convention would have yawned, if it had
+not trembled under him, but the Jacobin Club never found him tedious.
+Robespierre's style had no richness either of feeling or of phrase; no
+fervid originality, no happy violences. If we turn from a page of
+Rousseau to a page of Robespierre, we feel that the disciple has none of
+the thrilling sonorousness of the master; the glow and the ardour have
+become metallic; the long-drawn plangency is parodied by shrill notes of
+splenetic complaint. The rhythm has no broad wings; the phrases have no
+quality of radiance; the oratorical glimpses never lift the spirit into
+new worlds. We are never conscious of those great pulses of strong
+emotion that shake and vibrate through the nobly-measured periods of
+Cicero or Bossuet or Burke. Robespierre could not rival the vivid and
+highly-coloured declamation of Vergniaud; his speeches were never heated
+with the ardent passion that poured like a torrent of fire through some
+of the orations of Isnard; nor, above all, had he any mastery of that
+dialect of the Titans, by which Danton convulsed an audience with fear,
+with amazement, or with the spirit of defiant endeavour. The absence of
+these intenser qualities did not make Robespierre's speeches less
+effective for their own purpose. On the contrary, when the air has
+become torrid, and passionate utterance is cheap, then severity in form
+is very likely to pass for good sense in substance. That Robespierre had
+decent fluency, copiousness, and finish, need hardly be said. The French
+have an artistic sense; they have never accepted our own whimsical
+doctrine, that a man's politics must be sagacious, if his speaking is
+only clumsy enough. Robespierre more than once showed himself ready with
+a forcible reply on critical occasions: this only makes him an
+illustration the more of the good oratorical rule, that he is most
+likely to come well out of the emergency of an improvisation, who is
+usually most careful to prepare. Robespierre was as solicitous about the
+correctness of his speech, as he was about the neatness of his clothes;
+he no more grudged the pains given to the polishing of his discourses
+than he grudged the time given every day to the powdering of his hair.
+
+Nothing was more remarkable than his dexterity in presenting his case.
+James Mill used to point out to his son among other skilful arts of
+Demosthenes, these two: first, that he said everything important to his
+purpose at the exact moment when he had brought the minds of his hearers
+into the state most fitted to receive it; second, that he insinuated
+gradually and indirectly into their minds ideas which would have roused
+opposition if they had been expressed more directly. Mr. Mill once
+called the attention of the present writer to exactly the same kind of
+rhetorical skill in the speeches of Robespierre. The reader may do well
+to turn, for excellent specimens of this, to the speech of January 11,
+1792, against the war, or that of May 1794 against atheism. The logic is
+stringent, but the premises are arbitrary. Robespierre is as one who
+should iterate indisputable propositions of abstract geometry and
+mechanics, while men are craving an architect who shall bridge the gulf
+of waters. Exuberance of high words no longer conceals the sterility of
+his ideas and the shallowness of his method. We should say of his
+speeches, as of so much of the speaking and writing of the time, that it
+is transparent and smooth, but there is none of that quality which the
+critics of painting call Texture.
+
+His listeners, however, in the old refectory of the Convent of the
+Jacobins took little heed of these things; the matter was too absorbing,
+the issue too vital. A hundred years before, the hunted Covenanters of
+the Western Lowlands, with Claverhouse's dragoons a few miles off,
+exulted in the endless exhortations and expositions of their hill
+preachers: they relished nothing so keenly as three hours of
+Mucklewrath, followed by three hours more of Peter Poundtext. We now
+find the jargon of the Mucklewraths and the Poundtexts of the Solemn
+League and Covenant, dead as it is, still not devoid of the picturesque
+and the impressive. If we cannot say the same of the great preacher of
+the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the reason is partly that time has
+not yet softened the tones, and partly that there is no one in all the
+world with whom it is so difficult to sympathise, as with the narrower
+fanatics of our own particular faith.
+
+We have still to mark the trait that above everything else gave to
+Robespierre the trust and confidence of Paris. As men listened to him,
+they had full faith in the integrity of the speaker. And Robespierre in
+one way deserved this confidence. He was eminently the possessor of a
+conscience. When the strain of circumstance in the last few months of
+his life pressed him towards wrong, at least before doing wrong he was
+forced to lie to his own conscience. This is a kind of honesty, as the
+world goes. In the Salon of 1791 an artist exhibited Robespierre's
+portrait, simply inscribing it, _The Incorruptible_. Throngs passed
+before it every day, and ratified the honourable designation by eager
+murmurs of approval. The democratic journals were loud in panegyric on
+the unsleeping sentinel of liberty. They loved to speak of him as the
+modern Fabricius, and delighted to recall the words of Pyrrhus, that it
+is easier to turn the sun from its course, than to turn Fabricius from
+the path of honour. Patriotic parents eagerly besought him to be sponsor
+for their children. Ladies of wealth, including at least one
+countrywoman of our own, vainly entreated him to accept their purses,
+for women are quick to recognise the temperament of the priest, and
+recognising they adore. A rich widow of Nantes besought him with
+pertinacious tenderness to accept not only her purse but her hand.
+Mirabeau's sister hailed him as an eagle floating through the blue
+heavens.
+
+Robespierre's life was frugal and simple, as must always be seemly in
+the spokesman of the dumb multitude whose lives are very hard. He had a
+single room in the house of Duplay, at the extreme west end of the long
+Rue Saint Honoré, half a mile from the Jacobin Club, and less than that
+from the Riding School of the Tuileries, where the Constituent and
+Legislative Assemblies held session. His room, which served him for
+bed-chamber as well as for the uses of the day, was scantily furnished,
+and he shared the homely fare of his host. Duplay was a carpenter, a
+sworn follower of Robespierre, and the whole family cherished their
+guest as if he had been a son and a brother. Between him and the eldest
+daughter of the house there grew up a more tender sentiment, and
+Robespierre looked forward to the joys of the hearth, so soon as his
+country should be delivered from the oppressors without and the traitors
+within.
+
+Eagerly as Robespierre delighted in his popularity, he intended it to
+be a force and not a decoration. An occasion of testing his influence
+arose in the winter of 1791. The situation had become more and more
+difficult. The court was more disloyal and more perverse, as its hopes
+that the nightmare would come to an end became fainter. In the summer of
+1791, the German Emperor, the King of Prussia, and minor champions of
+retrograde causes issued the famous Declaration of Pilnitz. The menace
+of intervention was the one element needed to make the position of the
+monarchy desperate. It roused France to fever heat. For along with the
+foreign kings were the French princes of the blood and the French
+nobles. In the spring of 1792, the Assembly forced the King to declare
+war against Austria. Robespierre, in spite of the strong tide of warlike
+feeling, led the Jacobin opposition to the war. This is one of the most
+sagacious acts of his career, for the hazards of the conflict were
+terrible. If the foreigners and the emigrant nobles were victorious, all
+that the Revolution had won would be instantly and irretrievably lost.
+If, on the other hand, the French armies were victorious, one of two
+disasters might follow. Either the troops might become a weapon in the
+hands of the court and the reactionary party, for the suppression of all
+the progressive parties alike; or else their general might make himself
+supreme. Robespierre divined, what the Girondins did not, that Narbonne
+and the court, in accepting the cry for war, were secretly designing,
+first, to crush the faction of emigrant nobles, then to make the King
+popular at home, and thus finally to construct a strong royalist army.
+The Constitutional party in the Legislative Assembly had the same ideas
+as Narbonne. The Girondins sought war; first, from a genuine, if not a
+profoundly wise, enthusiasm for liberty, which they would fain have
+spread all over the world; and next, because they thought that war would
+increase their popularity, and give them decisive control of the
+situation.
+
+The first effect of the war declared in April 1792 was to shake down the
+throne. Operations had no sooner begun than the King became an object of
+bitter and amply warranted suspicion. Neither the leaders nor the people
+had forgotten his flight a year before to place himself at the head of
+the foreign invaders, nor the letter that he had left behind him for the
+National Assembly, protesting against all that had been done. They were
+again reminded of what short shrift they might expect if the King's
+friends should come back. The Duke of Brunswick at the head of the
+foreign army set out on his march, and issued his famous proclamation to
+the inhabitants of France. He demanded immediate and unconditional
+submission; he threatened with fire and sword every town, village, or
+hamlet, that should dare to defend itself; and finally, he swore that if
+the smallest violence or insult were done to the King or his family, the
+city of Paris should be handed over to military execution and absolute
+destruction. This insensate document bears marks in every line of the
+implacable hate and burning thirst for revenge that consumed the
+aristocratic refugees. Only civil war can awaken such rage as
+Brunswick's manifesto betrayed. It was drawn up by the French nobles at
+Coblenz. He merely signed it. The reply to it was the memorable
+insurrection of the Tenth of August 1792. The King was thrown into
+prison, and the Legislative Assembly made way for the National
+Convention.
+
+Robespierre's part in the great rising of August was only secondary.
+Only a few weeks before he had started a journal and written articles in
+a constitutional sense. M. d'Héricault believes a story that
+Robespierre's aim in this had been to have himself accepted as tutor for
+the young Dauphin. It is impossible to prove a negative, but we find
+great difficulty in believing that such a post could ever have been an
+object of Robespierre's ambition. Now and always he showed a rather
+singular preference for the substance of power over its glitter. He was
+vain and an egoist, but in spite of this, and in spite of his passion
+for empty phrases, he was not without a sense of reality.
+
+The insurrection of the 10th of August, however, was the idea, not of
+Robespierre, but of a more commanding personage, who now became one of
+the foremost of the Jacobin chiefs. De Maistre, that ardent champion of
+reaction, found a striking argument for the presence of the divine hand
+in the Revolution, in the intense mediocrity of the revolutionary
+leaders. How could such men, he asked, have achieved such results, if
+they had not been instruments of the directing will of heaven? Danton at
+any rate is above this caustic criticism. Danton was of the Herculean
+type of a Luther, though without Luther's deep vision of spiritual
+things; or a Chatham, though without Chatham's august majesty of life;
+or a Cromwell, though without Cromwell's calm steadfastness of patriotic
+purpose. His visage and port seemed to declare his character: dark
+overhanging brows; eyes that had the gleam of lightning; a savage mouth;
+an immense head; the voice of a Stentor. Madame Roland pictured him as a
+fiercer Sardanapalus. Artists called him Jove the Thunderer. His enemies
+saw in him the Satan of the Paradise Lost. He was no moral regenerator;
+the difference between him and Robespierre is typified in Danton's
+version of an old saying, that he who hates vices hates men. He was not
+free from that careless life-contemning desperation, which sometimes
+belongs to forcible natures. Danton cannot be called noble, because
+nobility implies a purity, an elevation, and a kind of seriousness which
+were not his. He was too heedless of his good name, and too blind to the
+truth that though right and wrong may be near neighbours, yet the line
+that separates them is of an awful sacredness. If Robespierre passed for
+a hypocrite by reason of his scruple, Danton seemed a desperado by his
+airs of 'immoral thoughtlessness.' But the world forgives much to a
+royal size, and Danton was one of the men who strike deep notes. He had
+that largeness of motive, fulness of nature, and capaciousness of mind,
+which will always redeem a multitude of infirmities.
+
+Though the author of some of the most tremendous and far-sounding
+phrases of an epoch that was only too rich in them, yet phrases had no
+empire over him; he was their master, not their dupe. Of all the men who
+succeeded Mirabeau as directors of the unchained forces, we feel that
+Danton alone was in his true element. Action, which poisoned the blood
+of such men as Robespierre, and drove such men as Vergniaud out of their
+senses with exaltation, was to Danton his native sphere. When France was
+for a moment discouraged, it was he who nerved her to new effort by the
+electrifying cry, '_We must dare, and again dare, and without end
+dare!_' If his rivals or his friends seemed too intent on trifles, too
+apt to confound side issues with the central aim of the battle, Danton
+was ever ready to urge them to take a juster measure:--'_When the
+edifice is all ablaze, I take little heed of the knaves who are
+pilfering the household goods; I rush to put out the flames._' When base
+egoism was compromising a cause more priceless than the personality of
+any man, it was Danton who made them ashamed by the soul-inspiring
+exclamation, '_Let my name be blotted out and my memory perish, if only
+France may be free._' The Girondins denounced the popular clubs of Paris
+as hives of lawlessness and outrage. Danton warned them that it were
+wiser to go to these seething societies and to guide them, than to waste
+breath in futile denunciation. 'A nation in revolution,' he cried to
+them, in a superb figure, 'is like the bronze boiling and foaming and
+purifying itself in the cauldron. Not yet is the statue of Liberty cast.
+Fiercely boils the metal; have an eye on the furnace, or the flame will
+surely scorch you.' If there was murderous work below the hatches, that
+was all the more reason why the steersman should keep his hand strong
+and ready on the wheel, with an eye quick for each new drift in the
+hurricane, and each new set in the raging currents. This is ever the
+figure under which one conceives Danton--a Titanic shape doing battle
+with the fury of the seas, yielding while flood upon flood sweeps wildly
+over him, and then with unshaken foothold and undaunted front once more
+surveying the waste of waters, and striving with dexterous energy to
+force the straining vessel over the waters of the bar.
+
+La Fayette had called the huge giant of popular force from its squalid
+lurking-places, and now he trembled before its presence, and fled from
+it shrieking, with averted hands. Marat thrust swords into the giant's
+half-unwilling grasp, and plied him with bloody incitement to slay hip
+and thigh, and so filled the land with a horror that has not faded from
+out of men's minds to this day. Danton instantly discerned that the
+problem was to preserve revolutionary energy, and still to persuade the
+insurgent forces to retire once more within their boundaries.
+Robespierre discerned this too, but he was paralysed and bewildered by
+his own principles, as the convinced doctrinaire is so apt to be amid
+the perplexities of practice. The teaching of Rousseau was ever pouring
+like thin smoke among his ideas, and clouding his view of actual
+conditions. The Tenth of August produced a considerable change in
+Robespierre's point of view. It awoke him to the precipitous steepness
+of the slope down which the revolutionary car was rushing headlong. His
+faith in the infallibility of the people suffered no shock, but he was
+in a moment alive to the need of walking warily, and his whole march
+from now until the end, twenty-three months later, became timorous,
+cunning, and oblique. His intelligence seemed to move in subterranean
+tunnels, with the gleam of an equivocal premiss at one end, and the mist
+of a vague conclusion at the other.
+
+The enthusiastic pedant, with his narrow understanding, his thin purism,
+and his idyllic sentimentalism, found that the summoning archangel of
+his paradise proved to be a ruffian with a pike. The shock must have
+been tremendous. Robespierre did not quail nor retreat; he only revised
+his notion of the situation. A curious interview once took place between
+him and Marat. Robespierre began by assuring the Friend of the People
+that he quite understood the atrocious demands for blood with which the
+columns of Marat's newspaper were filled, to be merely useful
+exaggerations of his real designs. Marat repelled the disparaging
+imputation of clemency and common sense, and talked in his familiar vein
+of poniarding brigands, burning despots alive in their palaces, and
+impaling the traitors of the Assembly on their own benches.
+'Robespierre,' says Marat, 'listened to me with affright; he turned pale
+and said nothing. The interview confirmed the opinion I had always had
+of him, that he united the integrity of a thoroughly honest man and the
+zeal of a good patriot, with the enlightenment of a wise senator, but
+that he was without either the views or the audacity of a real
+statesman.' The picture is instructive, for it shows us Robespierre's
+invariable habit of leaving violence and iniquity unrebuked; of
+conciliating the practitioners of violence and iniquity; and of
+contenting himself with an inward hope of turning the world into a right
+course by fine words. He had no audacity in Marat's sense, but he was no
+coward. He knew, as all these men knew, that almost from hour to hour he
+carried his life in his hand, yet he declined to seek shelter in the
+obscurity which saved such men as Sieyès. But if he had courage, he had
+not the initiative of a man of action. He invented none of the ideas or
+methods of the Revolution, not even the Reign of Terror, but he was very
+dexterous in accepting or appropriating what more audacious spirits than
+himself had devised and enforced. The pedant, cursed with the ambition
+to be a ruler of men, is a curious study. He would be glad not to go too
+far, and yet his chief dread is lest he be left behind. His
+consciousness of pure aims allows him to become an accomplice in the
+worst crimes. Suspecting himself at bottom to be a theorist, he hastens
+to clear his character as man of practice by conniving at an enormity.
+Thus, in September 1792, a band of miscreants committed the grievous
+massacres in the prisons of Paris. Robespierre, though the best evidence
+goes to show that he not only did not abet the prison murders, but in
+his heart deplored them, yet after the event did not scruple to justify
+what had been done. This was the beginning of a long course of
+compliance with sanguinary misdeeds, for which Robespierre has been as
+hotly execrated as if he prompted them. We do not, for the moment,
+measure the relative degrees of guilt that attached to mere compliance
+on the one hand, and cruel origination on the other. But his position in
+the Revolution is not rightly understood, unless we recognise him as
+being in almost every case an accessory after the fact.
+
+Between the fall of Lewis in 1792 and the fall of Robespierre in 1794,
+France was the scene of two main series of events. One set comprises the
+repulse of the invaders, the suppression of an extensive civil war, and
+the attempted reconstruction of a social framework. The other comprises
+the rapid phases of an internecine struggle of violent and short-lived
+factions. By an unhappy fatality, due partly to anti-democratic
+prejudice, and partly to men's unfailing passion for melodrama, the
+Reign of Terror has been popularly taken for the central and most
+important part of the revolutionary epic. This is nearly as absurd as it
+would be to make Gustave Flourens' manifestation of the Fifth of
+October, or the rising of the Thirty-first of October, the most
+prominent features in a history of the war of French defence in our own
+day. In truth, the Terror was a mere episode; and just as the rising of
+October 1870 was due to Marshal Bazaine's capitulation at Metz, it is
+easy to see that, with one exception, every violent movement in Paris,
+from 1792 to 1794, was due to menace or disaster on the frontier. Every
+one of the famous days of Paris was an answer to some enemy without. The
+storm of the Tuileries on the Tenth of August, as we have already said,
+was the response to Brunswick's proclamation. The bloody days of
+September were the reaction of panic at the capture of Longwy and Verdun
+by the Prussians. The surrender of Cambrai provoked the execution of
+Marie Antoinette. The defeat of Aix-la-Chapelle produced the abortive
+insurrection of the Tenth of March; and the treason of Dumouriez, the
+reverses of Custine, and the rebellion in La Vendée, produced the
+effectual insurrection of the Thirty-first of May 1793. The last of
+these two risings of Paris, headed by the Commune, against the
+Convention which was until then controlled by the Girondins, at length
+gave the government of France and the defence of the Revolution
+definitely over to the Jacobins. Their patriotic dictatorship lasted
+unbroken for a short period of ten months, and then the great party
+broke up into factions. The splendid triumphs of the dictatorship have
+been, in England at any rate, too usually forgotten, and only the crimes
+of the factions remembered. Robespierre's history unfortunately belongs
+to the less important battle.
+
+
+II
+
+The Girondins were driven out of the Convention by the insurgent
+Parisians at the beginning of June 1793. The movement may be roughly
+compared to that of the Independents in our own Rebellion, when the army
+compelled the withdrawal of eleven of the Presbyterian leaders from the
+parliament; or, it may recall Pride's memorable Purge of the same famous
+assembly. Both cases illustrate the common truth that large deliberative
+bodies, be they never so excellent for purposes of legislation, and even
+for a general control of the executive government in ordinary times, are
+found to be essentially unfit for directing a military crisis. If there
+are any historic examples that at first seem to contradict such a
+proposition, it will be found that the bodies in question were close
+aristocracies, like the Great Council of Venice, or the Senate of Rome
+in the strong days of the Commonwealth; they were never the creatures of
+popular election, with varying aims and a diversified political spirit.
+Modern publicists have substituted the divine right of assemblies for
+the old divine right of monarchies. Those who condone the violence done
+to the King on the Tenth of August, and even acquiesce in his execution
+five months afterwards, are relentless against the violence done to the
+Convention on the Thirty-first of May. We confess ourselves unable to
+follow this transfer of the superstition of sacrosanctity from a king to
+a chamber. No doubt, the sooner a nation acquires a settled government,
+the better for it, provided the government be efficient. But if it be
+not efficient, the mischief of actively suppressing it may well be fully
+outweighed by the mischief of retaining it. We have no wish to smooth
+over the perversities of a revolutionary time; they cost a nation very
+dear; but if all the elements of the state are in furious convulsion and
+uncontrollable effervescence, then it is childish to measure the march
+of events by the standard of happier days of social peace and political
+order. The prospect before France at the violent close of Girondin
+supremacy was as formidable as any nation has ever yet had to confront
+in the history of the world. Rome was not more critically placed when
+the defeat of Varro on the plain of Cannæ had broken up her alliances
+and ruined her army. The brave patriots of the Netherlands had no
+gloomier outlook at that dolorous moment when the Prince of Orange had
+left them, and Alva had been appointed to bring them back by rapine,
+conflagration, and murder, under the loathed yoke of the Spanish tyrant.
+
+Let us realise the conditions that Robespierre and Danton and the other
+Jacobin leaders had now to face. In the north-west one division of the
+fugitive Girondins was forming an army at Caen; in the south-west
+another division was doing the same at Bordeaux. Marseilles and Lyons
+were rallying all the disaffected and reactionary elements in the
+south-east. La Vendée had flamed out in wild rebellion for Church and
+King. The strong places on the north frontier, and the strong places on
+the east, were in the hands of the foreign enemy. The fate of the
+Revolution lay in the issue of a struggle between Paris, with less than
+a score of departments on her side, and all the rest of France and the
+whole European coalition marshalled against her. And even this was not
+the worst. In Paris itself a very considerable proportion of its
+half-million of inhabitants were disaffected to the revolutionary cause.
+Reactionary historians dwell on the fact that such risings as that of
+the Tenth of August were devised by no more than half of the sections
+into which Paris was divided. It was common, they say, for half a dozen
+individuals to take upon themselves to represent the fourteen or fifteen
+hundred other members of a section. But what better proof can we have
+that if France was to be delivered from restored feudalism and foreign
+spoliation, the momentous task must be performed by those who had sense
+to discern the awful peril, and energy to encounter it?
+
+The Girondins had made their incapacity plain. The execution of the King
+had filled them with alarm, and with hatred against the ruder and more
+robust party who had forced that startling act of vengeance upon them.
+Puny social disgusts prevented them from co-operating with Danton or
+with Robespierre. Prussia and Austria were not more redoubtable or more
+hateful to them than was Paris, and they wasted, in futile
+recriminations about the September massacres or the alleged peculations
+of municipal officers, the time and the energy that should have been
+devoted without let or interruption to the settlement of the
+administration and the repulse of the foe. It is impossible to think of
+such fine characters as Vergniaud or Madame Roland without admiration,
+or of their untimely fate without pity. But the deliverance of a people
+beset by strong and implacable enemies could not wait on mere good
+manners and fastidious sentiments, when these comely things were in
+company with the most stupendous want of foresight ever shown by a
+political party. How can we measure the folly of men who so missed the
+conditions of the problem as to cry out in the Convention itself, almost
+within earshot of the Jacobin Club, that if any insult were offered to
+the national representation, the departments would rise, 'Paris would be
+annihilated; and men would come to search on the banks of the Seine
+whether such a city had ever existed!' It was to no purpose that Danton
+urgently rebuked the senseless animosity with which the Right poured
+incessant malediction on the Left, and the wild shrieking hate with
+which the Left retaliated on the Right. The battle was to the death, and
+it was the Girondins who first menaced their political foes with
+vengeance and the guillotine. As it happened, the treason of Dumouriez
+and their own ineptitude destroyed them before revenge was within reach.
+Such a consummation was fortunate for their country. It was the
+Girondins whose want of union and energy had by the middle of 1793
+brought France to distraction and imminent ruin. It was a short year of
+Jacobin government that by the summer of 1794 had welded the nation
+together again, and finally conquered the invasion. The city of the
+Seine had once more shown itself what it had been for nine centuries,
+ever since the days of Odo, Count of Paris and first King of the French,
+not merely a capital, but France itself, 'its living heart and surest
+bulwark.'
+
+The immediate instrument of so rapid and extraordinary an achievement
+was the Committee of Public Safety. The French have never shown their
+quick genius for organisation with more triumphant vigour. While the
+Girondins were still powerful, nine members of the Convention had been
+constituted an executive committee, April 6, 1793. They were in fact a
+kind of permanent cabinet, with practical irresponsibility. In the
+summer of 1793 the number was increased from nine to twelve, and these
+twelve were the centre of the revolutionary government. They fell into
+three groups. First, there were the scientific or practical
+administrators, of whom the most eminent was Carnot. Next came the
+directors of internal policy, the pure revolutionists, headed by Billaud
+de Varennes. Finally, there was a trio whose business it was to
+translate action into the phrases of revolutionary policy. This famous
+group was Robespierre, Couthon, and Saint Just.
+
+Besides the Committee of Public Safety there was another chief
+governmental committee, that of General Security. Its functions were
+mainly connected with the police, the arrests, and the prisons, but in
+all serious affairs the two Committees deliberated in common. There were
+also fourteen other groups of various size, taken from the Convention;
+they applied themselves with admirable zeal, and usually not with more
+zeal than skill, to schemes of public instruction, of finance, of
+legislation, of the administration of justice, and a host of other civil
+reforms, of all of which Napoleon Bonaparte was by and by to reap the
+credit. These bodies completed the civil revolution, which the
+Constituent and the Legislative Assemblies had left so mischievously
+incomplete that, as soon as ever the Convention had assembled, it was
+besieged by a host of petitioners praying them to explain and to pursue
+the abolition of the old feudal rights. Everything had still been left
+uncertain in men's minds, even upon that greatest of all the
+revolutionary questions. The feudal division of the committee of general
+legislation had in this eleventh hour to decide innumerable issues, from
+those of the widest practical importance, down to the prayer of a remote
+commune to be relieved from the charge of maintaining a certain mortuary
+lamp which had been a matter of seignorial obligation. The work done by
+the radical jurisconsults was never undone. It was the great and
+durable reward of the struggle. And we have to remember that these
+industrious and efficient bodies, as well as all other public bodies and
+functionaries whatever, were placed by the definite revolutionary
+constitution of 1793 under the direct orders of the Committee of Public
+Safety.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is hardly possible even now for any one who exults in the memory of
+the great deliverance of a brilliant and sociable people, to stand
+unmoved before the walls of that palace which Philibert Delorme reared
+for Catherine de' Medici, and which was thrown into ruin by the madness
+of a band of desperate men in our own days. Lewis had walked forth from
+the Tuileries on the fatal morning of the Tenth of August, holding his
+children by the hand, and lightly noticing, as he traversed the gardens,
+how early that year the leaves were falling. Lewis had by this time
+followed the fallen leaves into nothingness. The palace of the kings was
+now styled the Palace of the Nation, and the new republic carried on its
+work surrounded by the outward associations of the old monarchy. The
+Convention after the spring of 1793 held its sittings in what had
+formerly been the palace theatre. Fierce men from the Faubourgs of St.
+Antoine and St. Marceau, and fiercer women from the markets, shouted
+savage applause or menace from galleries, where not so long ago the
+Italian buffoons had amused the perpetual leisure of the finest ladies
+and proudest grandees of France. The Committee of General Security
+occupied the Pavillon de Marsan, looking over a dingy space that the
+conqueror at Rivoli afterwards made the most dazzling street in Europe.
+The Committee of Public Safety sat in the Pavillon de Flore, at the
+opposite end of the Tuileries on the river bank. The approaches were
+protected by guns and by a bodyguard, while inside there flitted to and
+fro a cloud of familiars, who have been compared by the enemies of the
+great Committee to the mutes of the court of the Grand Turk. Any one who
+had business with this awful body had to grope his way along gloomy
+corridors, that were dimly lighted by a single lamp at either end. The
+room in which the Committee sat round a table of green cloth was
+incongruously gay with the clocks, the bronzes, the mirrors, the
+tapestries, of the ruined court. The members met at eight in the morning
+and worked until one; from one to four they attended the sitting of the
+Convention. In the evening they met again, and usually sat until night
+was far advanced. It was no wonder if their hue became cadaverous, their
+eyes hollow and bloodshot, their brows stern, their glance preoccupied
+and sinister. Between ten and eleven every evening a sombre piece of
+business was transacted, which has half effaced in the memory of
+posterity all the heroic industry of the rest of the twenty-four hours.
+It was then that Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor, brought an
+account of his day's labour; how the revolutionary tribunal was working,
+how many had been convicted and how many acquitted, how large or how
+small had been the batch of the guillotine since the previous night.
+Across the breadth of the gardens, beyond their trees and fountains,
+stood the Monster itself, with its cruel symmetry, its colour as of the
+blood of the dead, its unheeding knife, neutral as the Fates.
+
+Robespierre has been held responsible for all the violences of the
+revolutionary government, and his position on the Committee appeared to
+be exceedingly strong. It was, however, for a long time much less strong
+in reality than it seemed: all depended upon successfully playing off
+one force against another, and at the same time maintaining himself at
+the centre of the see-saw. Robespierre was the literary and rhetorical
+member of the band; he was the author of the strident manifestoes in
+which Europe listened with exasperation to the audacious hopes and
+unfaltering purpose of the new France. This had the effect of investing
+him in the eyes of foreign nations with supreme and undisputed authority
+over the government. The truth is, that Robespierre was both disliked
+and despised by his colleagues. They thought of him as a mere maker of
+useful phrases; he in turn secretly looked down upon them, as the man
+who has a doctrine and a system in his head always looks down upon the
+man who lives from hand to mouth. If the Committee had been in the place
+of a government which has no opposition to fear, Robespierre would have
+been one of its least powerful members. But although the government was
+strong, there were at least three potent elements of opposition even
+within the ranks of the dominant revolutionary party itself.
+
+Three bodies in Paris were, each of them, the centre of an influence
+that might at any moment become the triumphant rival of the Committee of
+Public Safety. These bodies were, first, the Convention; second, the
+Commune of Paris; and thirdly, the Jacobin Club. The jealousy thus
+existing outside the Committee would have made any failure instantly
+destructive. At one moment, at the end of 1793, it was only the
+surrender of Toulon that saved the Committee from a hostile motion in
+the Convention, and such a motion would have sent half of them to the
+guillotine. They were reviled by the extreme party who ruled at the Town
+Hall for not carrying the policy of extermination far enough. They were
+reproached by Danton and his powerful section for carrying that policy
+too far. They were discredited by the small band of intriguers, like
+Bazire, who identified government with peculation. Finally, they were
+haunted by the shadow of a fear, which events were by and by to prove
+only too substantial, lest one of their military agents on the frontier
+should make himself their master. The key to the struggle of the
+factions between the winter of 1793 and the revolution of the summer of
+1794 is the vigorous resolve of the governing Committees not to part
+with power. The drama is one of the most exciting in the history of
+faction; it abounds in rapid turns and unexpected shifts, upon which the
+student may spend many a day and many a night, and after all he is
+forced to leave off in despair of threading an accurate way through the
+labyrinth of passion and intrigue. The broad traits of the situation,
+however, are tolerably simple. The difficulty was to find a principle of
+government which the people could be induced to accept. 'The rights of
+men and the new principles of liberty and equality,' Burke said, 'were
+very unhandy instruments for those who wished to establish a system of
+tranquillity and order. The factions,' he added with fierce sarcasm,
+'were to accomplish the purposes of order, morality, and submission to
+the laws, from the principles of atheism, profligacy, and sedition. They
+endeavoured to establish distinctions, by the belief of which they hoped
+to keep the spirit of murder safely bottled up and sealed for their own
+purposes, without endangering themselves by the fumes of the poison
+which they prepared for their enemies.' This is a ferocious and
+passionate version, but it is substantially not an unreal account of the
+position.
+
+Upon one point all parties agreed, and that was the necessity of
+founding the government upon force, and force naturally meant Terror.
+Their plea was that of Dido to Ilioneus and the stormbeaten sons of
+Dardanus, when they complained that her people had drawn the sword upon
+them, and barbarously denied the hospitality of the sandy shore:--
+
+   Res dura et regni novitas me talia cogunt Moliri.
+
+And that pithy chapter in Machiavelli's _Prince_ which treats of cruelty
+and clemency, and whether it be better to be loved or feared,
+anticipates the defence of the Terrorists, in the maxim that for a new
+prince it is impossible to avoid the name of cruel, because all new
+states abound in many perils. The difference arose on the question when
+Terror should be considered to have done as much of its work as it could
+be expected to do. This difference again was connected with difference
+of conception as to the type of the society which was ultimately to
+emerge from the existing chaos. Billaud-Varennes, the guiding spirit of
+the Committees, was without any conception of this kind. He was a man of
+force pure and simple. Danton was equally untouched by dreams of social
+transformation; his philosophy, so far as he had a definite philosophy,
+was, in spite of one or two inconsistent utterances, materialistic: and
+materialism, when it takes root in a sane, perspicacious, and indulgent
+character, as in the case of Danton, and, to take a better-known
+example, in the case of Jefferson, usually leads to a sound and positive
+theory of politics; chimeras have no place in it, though a rational
+social hope has the first place of all. Neither Danton nor Billaud
+expected a millennium; their only aim was to shape France into a
+coherent political personality, and the war between them turned upon the
+policy of prolonging the Terror after the frontiers had been saved and
+the risings in the provinces put down. There were, however, two parties
+who took the literature of the century in earnest; they thought that the
+hour had struck for translating, one of them, the sentimentalism of
+Rousseau, the other of them, the rationality of Voltaire and Diderot,
+into terms of politics that should form the basis of a new social life.
+The strife between the faction of Robespierre and the faction of
+Chaumette was the reproduction, under the shadow of the guillotine, of
+the great literary strife of a quarter of a century before between Jean
+Jacques and the writers whom he contemptuously styled Holbachians. The
+battle of the books had become a battle between bands of infuriated men.
+The struggle between Hébert and Chaumette and the Common Council of
+Paris on the one part, and the Committee and Robespierre on the other,
+was the concrete form of the deepest controversy that lies before modern
+society. Can the social union subsist without a belief in God? Chaumette
+answered Yes, and Robespierre cried No. Robespierre followed Rousseau in
+thinking that any one who should refuse to recognise the existence of a
+God, should be exiled as a monster devoid of the faculties of virtue and
+sociability. Chaumette followed Diderot, and Diderot told Samuel Romilly
+in 1783 that belief in God, as well as submission to kings, would be at
+an end all over the world in a very few years. The Hébertists might have
+taken for their motto Diderot's shocking couplet, if they could have
+known it, about using
+
+   Les entrailles du prêtre
+   Au défaut d'un cordon pour étrangler les rois.
+
+The theists and the atheists, Chaumette and Robespierre, each of them
+accepted the doctrine that it was in the power of the armed legislator
+to impose any belief and any rites he pleased upon the country at his
+feet. The theism or the atheism of the new France depended, as they
+thought, on the issue of the war for authority between the Hébertists in
+the Common Council of Paris, and the Committee of Public Safety. That
+was the religious side of the attitude of the government to the
+opposition, and it is the side that possesses most historic interest.
+Billaud cared very little for religion in any way; his quarrel with the
+Commune and with Hébert was political. What Robespierre's drift appears
+to have been, was to use the political animosity of the Committee as a
+means of striking foes, against whom his own animosity was not only
+political but religious also.
+
+It would doubtless show a very dull apprehension of the violence and
+confusion of the time, to suppose that even Robespierre, with all his
+love for concise theories, was accustomed to state his aim to himself
+with the definite neatness in which it appears when reduced to literary
+statement. Pedant as he was, he was yet enough of a politician to see
+the practical urgency of restoring material order, whatever spiritual
+belief or disbelief might accompany it. The prospect of a rallying point
+for material order was incessantly changing; and Robespierre turned to
+different quarters in search of it almost from week to week. He was only
+able to exert a certain limited authority over his colleagues in the
+government, by virtue of his influence over the various sections of
+possible opposition, and this was a moral, and not an official,
+influence. It was acquired not by marked practical gifts, for in truth
+Robespierre did not possess them, but by his good character, by his
+rhetoric, and by the skill with which he kept himself prominently before
+the public eye. The effective seat of his power, notwithstanding many
+limits and incessant variations, was the Jacobin Club. There a speech
+from him threw his listeners into ecstasies, that have been
+disrespectfully compared to the paroxysms of Jansenist convulsionaries,
+or the hysterics of Methodist negroes on a cotton plantation. We
+naturally think of those grave men who a few years before had founded
+the republic in America. Jefferson served with Washington in the
+Virginian legislature and with Franklin in Congress, and he afterwards
+said that he never heard either of them speak ten minutes at a time;
+while John Adams declared that he never heard Jefferson utter three
+sentences together. Of Robespierre it is stated on good authority that
+for eighteen months there was not a single evening on which he did not
+make to the assembled Jacobins at least one speech, and that never a
+short one.
+
+Strange as it may seem, Robespierre's credit with this grim assembly was
+due to his truly Philistine respectability and to his literary faculty.
+He figured as the philosopher and bookman of the party: the most
+iconoclastic politicians are usually willing to respect the scholar,
+provided they are sure of his being on their side. Robespierre had from
+the first discountenanced the fantastic caprices of some too excitable
+allies. He distrusted the noisy patriots of the middle class, who
+curried favour with the crowd by clothing themselves in coarse garments,
+clutching a pike, and donning the famous cap of red woollen, which had
+been the emblem of the emancipation of a slave in ancient Rome. One
+night at the Jacobin Club, Robespierre mounted the tribune, dressed with
+his usual elaborate neatness, and still wearing powder in his hair. An
+onlooker unceremoniously planted on the orator's head the red cap
+demanded by revolutionary etiquette. Robespierre threw the sacred symbol
+on the ground with a severe air, and then proceeded with a discourse of
+much austerity. Not that he was averse to a certain seemly decoration,
+or to the embodiment of revolutionary sentiment by means of a symbolism
+that strikes our cooler imagination as rather puerile. He was as ready
+as others to use the arts of the theatre for the liturgy of patriots.
+One of the most touching of all the minor dramatic incidents of the
+Revolution was the death of Barra. This was a child of thirteen who
+enrolled himself as a drummer, and marched with the Blues to suppress
+the rebel Whites in La Vendée. One day he advanced too close to the
+enemy's post, intrepidly beating the charge. He was surrounded, but the
+peasant soldiers were loth to strike, 'Cry _Long live the King!_' they
+shouted, 'or else death!' 'Long live the Republic!' was the poor little
+hero's answer, as a ball pierced his heart. Robespierre described the
+incident to the Convention, and amid prodigious enthusiasm demanded that
+the body of the young martyr of liberty should be transported to the
+Pantheon with special pomp, and that David, the artist of the
+Revolution, should be charged with the duty of devising and embellishing
+the festival. As it happened, the arrangements were made for the
+ceremony to take place on the Tenth of Thermidor--a day on which
+Robespierre and all Paris were concerned about a celebration of bloodier
+import. Thermidor, however, was still far off; and the red sun of
+Jacobin enthusiasm seemed as if it would shine unclouded for ever.
+
+Even at the Jacobins, however, popular as he was, Robespierre felt every
+instant the necessity of walking cautiously. He was as far removed as
+possible from that position of Dictator which some historians with a
+wearisome iteration persist in ascribing to him, even at the moment when
+they are enumerating the defeats which the party of Hébert was able to
+inflict upon him in the very bosom of the Mother Club itself. They make
+him the sanguinary dictator in one sentence, and the humiliated
+intriguer in the next. The latter is much the more correct account of
+the two, if we choose to call a man an intriguer who was honestly
+anxious to suppress what he considered a wicked faction, and yet had
+need of some dexterity to keep his own head upon his shoulders.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the winter of 1793 the Municipal party, guided by Hébert and
+Chaumette, made their memorable attempt to extirpate Christianity in
+France. The doctrine of D'Holbach's supper-table had for a short space
+the arm of flesh and the sword of the temporal power on its side. It was
+the first appearance of dogmatic atheism in Europe as a political force.
+This makes it one of the most remarkable moments in the Revolution, just
+as it makes the Revolution itself the most remarkable moment in modern
+history. The first political demonstration of atheism was attended by
+some of the excesses, the folly, the extravagances that stained the
+growth of Christianity. On the whole it is a very mild story compared
+with the atrocities of the Jewish records or the crimes of Catholicism.
+The worst charge against the party of Chaumette is that they were
+intolerant, and the charge is deplorably true; but this charge cannot
+lie in the mouth of persecuting churches.
+
+Historical recriminations, however, are not very edifying. It is
+perfectly fair when Catholics talk of the atheist Terror, to rejoin that
+the retainers of Anjou and Montpensier slew more men and women on the
+first day of the Saint Bartholomew than perished in Paris through the
+Years I. and II. But the retort does us no good beyond the region of
+dialectic; it rather brings us down to the level of the poor sectaries
+whom it crushes. Let us raise ourselves into clearer air. The fault of
+the atheist is that they knew no better than to borrow the maxims of the
+churchmen; and even those who agree with the dogmatic denials of the
+atheists--if such there be--ought yet to admit that the mere change from
+superstition to reason is a small gain, if the conclusions of reason are
+still to be enforced by the instruments of superstition. Our opinions
+are less important than the spirit and temper with which they possess
+us, and even good opinions are worth very little unless we hold them in
+a broad, intelligent, and spacious way. Now some of the opinions of
+Chaumette were full of enlightenment and hope. He had a generous and
+vivid faith in humanity, and he showed the natural effect of abandoning
+belief in another life by his energetic interest in arrangements for
+improving the lot of man in this life. But it would be far better to
+share the superstitious opinions of a virtuous and benignant priest like
+the Bishop in Victor Hugo's _Misérables_, than to hold those good
+opinions of Chaumette as he held them, with a rancorous intolerance, a
+reckless disregard of the rights and feelings of others, and a shallow
+forgetfulness of all that great and precious part of our natures that
+lies out of the immediate domain of the logical understanding. One can
+understand how an honest man would abhor the darkness and tyranny of the
+Church. But then to borrow the same absolutism in the interests of new
+light, was inevitably to bring the new light into the same abhorrence
+as had befallen the old system of darkness. And this is exactly what
+happened. In every family where a mother sought to have her child
+baptized, or where sons and daughters sought to have the dying spirit of
+the old consoled by the last sacrament, there sprang up a bitter enemy
+to the government which had closed the churches and proscribed the
+priests.
+
+How could a society whose spiritual life had been nourished in the
+solemn mysticism of the Middle Ages, suddenly turn to embrace a gaudy
+paganism? The common self-respect of humanity was outraged by apostate
+priests who, whether under the pressure of fear of Chaumette, or in a
+very superfluity of folly and ecstasy of degradation, hastened to
+proclaim the charlatanry of their past lives, as they filed before the
+Convention, led by the Archbishop of Paris, and accompanied by rude
+acolytes bearing piles of the robes and the vessels of silver and gold
+with which they had once served their holy offices. 'Our enemies,'
+Voltaire had said, 'have always on their side the fat of the land, the
+sword, the strong box, and the _canaille_.' For a moment all these
+forces were on the other side, and it is deplorable to think that they
+were as much abused by their new masters as by the old. The explanation
+is that the destructive party had been brought up in the schools of the
+ecclesiastical party, and their work was a mere outbreak of mutiny, not
+a grave and responsible attempt to lead France to a worthier faith. If,
+as Chaumette believed, mankind are the only Providence of men, surely
+in that faith more than in any other are we bound to be very solicitous
+not to bring the violent hand of power on any of the spiritual
+acquisitions of the race, and very patient in dealing with the slowness
+of the common people to leave their outworn creeds.
+
+Instead of defying the Church by the theatrical march of the Goddess of
+Reason under the great sombre arches of the Cathedral of Our Lady,
+Chaumette should have found comfort in a firm calculation of the
+conditions. 'You,' he might have said to the priests,--'you have so
+debilitated the minds of men and women by your promises and your dreams,
+that many a generation must come and go before Europe can throw off the
+yoke of your superstition. But we promise you that they shall be
+generations of strenuous battle. We give you all the advantages that you
+can get from the sincerity and pious worth of the good and simple among
+you. We give you all that the bad among you may get by resort to the
+poisoned weapons of your profession and its traditions,--its bribes to
+mental indolence, its hypocritical affectations in the pulpit, its
+tyranny in the closet, its false speciousness in the world, its menace
+at the deathbed. With all these you may do your worst, and still
+humanity will escape you; still the conscience of the race will rise
+away from you; still the growth of brighter ideals and a nobler purpose
+will go on, leaving ever further and further behind them your dwarfed
+finality and leaden moveless stereotype. We shall pass you by on your
+flank; your fieriest darts will only spend themselves on air. We will
+not attack you as Voltaire did; we will not exterminate you; we shall
+explain you. History will place your dogma in its class, above or below
+a hundred competing dogmas, exactly as the naturalist classifies his
+species. From being a conviction, it will sink to a curiosity; from
+being the guide to millions of human lives, it will dwindle down to a
+chapter in a book. As History explains your dogma, so Science will dry
+it up; the conception of law will silently make the conception of the
+daily miracle of your altars seem impossible; the mental climate will
+gradually deprive your symbols of their nourishment, and men will turn
+their backs on your system, not because they have confuted it, but
+because, like witchcraft or astrology, it has ceased to interest them.
+The great ship of your Church, once so stout and fair and well laden
+with good destinies, is become a skeleton ship; it is a phantom hulk,
+with warped planks and sere canvas, and you who work it are no more than
+ghosts of dead men, and at the hour when you seem to have reached the
+bay, down your ship will sink like lead or like stone to the deepest
+bottom.'
+
+Alas, the speculation of the century had not rightly attuned men's minds
+to this firm confidence in the virtue of liberty, sounding like a bell
+through all distractions. None of these high things were said. The
+temples were closed, the sacred symbols defiled, the priests
+maltreated, the worshippers dispersed. The Commune of Paris imitated the
+policy of the King of France who revoked the Edict of Nantes, and
+democratic atheism parodied the dragonnades of absolutist Catholicism.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Robespierre was unutterably outraged by the proceedings of the atheists.
+They perplexed him as a politician intent upon order, and they afflicted
+him sorely as an ardent disciple of the Savoyard Vicar. Hébert, however,
+was so strong that it needed some courage to attack him, nor did
+Robespierre dare to withstand him to the face. But he did not flinch
+from making an energetic assault upon atheism and the excesses of its
+partisans. His admirers usually count his speech of the Twenty-first of
+November one of the most admirable of his oratorical successes. The
+Sphinx still sits inexorable at our gates, and his words have lost none
+of their interest. 'Every philosopher and every individual,' he said,
+'may adopt whatever opinion he pleases about atheism. Any one who wishes
+to make such an opinion into a crime is an insensate; but the public man
+or the legislator who should adopt such a system, would be a hundred
+times more insensate still. The National Convention abhors it. The
+Convention is not the author of a scheme of metaphysics. It was not to
+no purpose that it published the Declaration of the Rights of Man in
+presence of the Supreme Being. I shall be told perhaps that I have a
+narrow intelligence, that I am a man of prejudice, and a fanatic. I
+have already said that I spoke neither as an individual nor as a
+philosopher with a system, but as a representative of the people.
+_Atheism is aristocratic. The idea of a great being who watches over
+oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is essentially the
+idea of the people._ This is the sentiment of Europe and the Universe;
+it is the sentiment of the French nation. That people is attached
+neither to priests, nor to superstition, nor to ceremonies; it is
+attached only to worship in itself, or in other words to the idea of an
+incomprehensible Power, the terror of wrongdoers, the stay and comfort
+of virtue, to which it delights to render words of homage that are all
+so many anathemas against injustice and triumphant crime.'
+
+This is Robespierre's favourite attitude, the priest posing as
+statesman. Like others, he declares the Supreme Power incomprehensible,
+and then describes him in terms of familiar comprehension. He first
+declares atheism an open choice, and then he brands it with the most
+odious epithet in the accepted vocabulary of the hour. Danton followed
+practically the same line, though saying much less about it. 'If
+Greece,' he said in the Convention, 'had its Olympian games, France too
+shall solemnise her sans-culottid days. The people will have high
+festivals; they will offer incense to the Supreme Being, to the master
+of nature; for we never intended to annihilate the reign of superstition
+in order to set up the reign of atheism.... If we have not honoured the
+priest of error and fanaticism, neither do we wish to honour the priest
+of incredulity: we wish to serve the people. I demand that there shall
+be an end of these anti-religious masquerades in the Convention.'
+
+There was an end of the masquerading, but the Hébertists still kept
+their ground. Danton, Robespierre, and the Committee were all equally
+impotent against them for some months longer. The revolutionary force
+had been too strong to be resisted by any government since the Paris
+insurgents had carried both King and Assembly in triumph from Versailles
+in the October of 1789. It was now too strong for those who had begun to
+strive with all their might to build a new government out of the
+agencies that had shattered the old to pieces. For some months the
+battle which had been opened by Robespierre's remonstrance against
+atheistic intolerance, degenerated into a series of masked skirmishes.
+The battle-ground of rival principles was overshadowed by the baleful
+wings of the genius of demonic Hate. _Vexilla regis prodeunt inferni_;
+the banners of the King of the Pit came forth. The scene at the
+Cordeliers for a time became as frantic as a Council of the Early Church
+settling the true composition of the Holy Trinity. Or it recalls the
+fierce and bloody contentions between Demos and Oligarchy in an old
+Greek town. We think of the day in the harbour of Corcyra when the
+Athenian admiral who had come to deliver the people, sailed out to meet
+the Spartan enemy, and on turning round to see if his Corcyrean allies
+were following, saw them following indeed, but the crew of every ship
+striving in enraged conflict with one another. Collot D'Herbois had come
+back in hot haste from Lyons, where, along with Fouché, he had done his
+best to carry out the decree of the Convention, that not one stone of
+the city should be left on the top of another, and that even its very
+name should cease from the lips of men. Carrier was recalled from
+Nantes, where his feats of ingenious massacre had rivalled the exploits
+of the cruellest and maddest of the Roman Emperors. The presence of
+these men of blood gave new courage and resolution to the Hébertists.
+Though the alliance was informal, yet as against Danton, Camille
+Desmoulins, and the rest of the Indulgents, as well as against
+Robespierre, they made common cause.
+
+Camille Desmoulins attacked Hébert in successive numbers of a journal
+that is perhaps the one truly literary monument of this stage of the
+revolution. Hébert retaliated by impugning the patriotism of Desmoulins
+in the Club, and the unfortunate wit, notwithstanding the efforts of
+Robespierre on his behalf, was for a while turned out of the sacred
+precincts. The power of the extreme faction was shown in relation to
+other prominent members of the party whom they loved to stigmatise by
+the deadly names of Indulgent and Moderantist. Even Danton himself was
+attacked (December 1793), and the integrity of his patriotism brought
+into question. Robespierre made an energetic defence of his great rival
+in the hierarchy of revolution, and the defence saved Danton from the
+mortal ignominy of expulsion from the communion of the orthodox. On the
+other hand, Anacharsis Clootz, that guileless ally of the party of
+delirium, was less fortunate. Robespierre assailed the cosmopolitan for
+being a German baron, for having four thousand pounds a year, and for
+striking his sans-culottism some notes higher than the regular pitch.
+Even M. Louis Blanc calls this an iniquity, and sets it down as the
+worst page in Robespierre's life. Others have described Robespierre as
+struck at this time by the dire malady of kings--hatred of the Idea. It
+seems, however, a hard saying that devotion to the Idea is to extinguish
+common sense. Clootz, notwithstanding his simple and disinterested
+character, and his possession of some rays of the modern illumination,
+was one of the least sane of all the men who in the exultation of their
+silly gladness were suddenly caught up by that great wheel of fire. All
+we can say is that Robespierre's bitter demeanour towards Clootz was
+ungenerous; but then this is only natural in him. Robespierre often
+clothed cool policy in the semblance of clemency, but I cannot hear in
+any phrase he ever used, or see in any measure he ever proposed, the
+mark of true generosity; of kingliness of spirit, not a trace. He had no
+element of ready and cordial propitiation, an element that can never be
+wanting in the greatest leaders in time of storm. If he resisted the
+atrocious proposals to put Madame Elizabeth to death, he was thinking
+not of mercy or justice, but of the mischievous effect that her
+execution would have upon the public opinion of Europe, and he was so
+unmanly as to speak of her as _la méprisable soeur de Louis XVI_. Such
+a phrase is the disclosure of an abject stratum in his soul.
+
+Yet this did not prevent him from seeing and denouncing the bloody
+extravagances of the Proconsuls, the representatives of Parisian
+authority in the provinces; nor from standing firm against the execution
+of the Seventy-Three, who had been bold enough to question the purgation
+of the National Convention on the Thirty-first of May. But the return of
+Collot d'Herbois made the situation more intricate. Collot was by his
+position the ally of Billaud, and to attack him, therefore, was to
+attack the most powerful member of the Committee of Public Safety.
+Billaud was too formidable. He was always the impersonation of the ruder
+genius of the Revolution, and the incarnation of the philosophy of the
+Terror, not as a delirium, but as a piece of deliberate policy. His
+pale, sober, and concentrated physiognomy seemed a perpetual menace. He
+had no gifts of speech, but his silence made people shudder, like the
+silence of the thunder when the tempest rages at its height. It was said
+by contemporaries that if Vadier was a hyæna, Barère a jackal, and
+Robespierre a cat, Billaud was a tiger.
+
+The cat perceived that he was in danger of not having the tiger, jackal,
+and hyæna, on his side. Robespierre, in whom spasmodical courage and
+timidity ruled by rapid turns, began to suspect that he had been
+premature; and a convenient illness, which some suppose to have been
+feigned, excused his withdrawal for some weeks from a scene where he
+felt that he could no longer see clear. We cannot doubt that both he and
+Danton were perfectly assured that the anarchic party must unavoidably
+roll headlong into the abyss. But the hour of doom was uncertain. To
+make a mistake in the right moment, to hurry the crisis, was instant
+death. Robespierre was a more adroit calculator than Danton. We must not
+confound his thin and querulous reserve with that stout and deep-browed
+patience, which may imply as superb a fortitude, and may demand as much
+iron control in a statesman, as the most heroic exploits of political
+energy. But his habit of waiting on force, instead of, like the other,
+taking the initiative with force, had trained his sight. The mixture of
+astuteness with his scruple, of egoistic policy with his stiffness for
+doctrine, gave him an advantage over Danton, that made his life worth
+exactly three months' more purchase than Danton's. It has been said that
+Spinozism or Transcendentalism in poetic production becomes
+Machiavellism in reflection: for the same reasons we may always expect
+sentimentalism in theory to become under the pressure of action a very
+self-protecting guile. Robespierre's mind was not rich nor flexible
+enough for true statesmanship, and it is a grave mistake to suppose that
+the various cunning tacks in which his career abounds, were any sign of
+genuine versatility or resource or political growth and expansion. They
+were, in fact, the resort of a man whose nerves were weaker than his
+volition. Robespierre was a kind of spinster. Force of head did not
+match his spiritual ambition. He was not, we repeat, a coward in any
+common sense; in that case he would have remained quiet among the
+croaking frogs of the Marsh, and by and by have come to hold a portfolio
+under the first Consul. He did not fear death, and he envied with
+consuming envy those to whom nature had given the qualities of
+initiative. But his nerves always played him false. The consciousness of
+having to resolve to take a decided step alone, was the precursor of a
+fit of trembling. His heart did not fail, but he could not control the
+parched voice, nor the twitching features, not the ghastly palsy of
+inner misgiving. In this respect Robespierre recalls a more illustrious
+man; we think of Cicero tremblingly calling upon the Senate to decide
+for him whether he should order the execution of the Catilinarian
+conspirators. It is to be said, however, in his favour that he had the
+art, which Cicero lacked, to hide his pusillanimity. Robespierre knew
+himself, and did his best to keep his own secret.
+
+His absence during the final crisis of the anarchic party allowed events
+to ripen, without committing him to that initiative in dangerous action
+which he had dreaded on the Tenth of August, as he dreaded it on every
+other decisive day of this burning time. The party of the Commune
+became more and more daring in their invectives against the Convention
+and the Committees. At length they proclaimed open insurrection. But
+Paris was cold, and opinion was divided. In the night of the Thirteenth
+of March, Hébert, Chaumette, Clootz, were arrested. The next day
+Robespierre recovered sufficiently to appear at the Jacobin Club. He
+joined his colleagues of the Committee of Public Safety in striking the
+blow. On the Twenty-fourth of March the Ultra-Revolutionist leaders were
+beheaded.
+
+The first bloody breach in the Jacobin ranks was speedily followed by
+the second. The Right wing of the opposition to the Committee soon
+followed the Left down the ways to dusty death, and the execution of the
+Anarchists only preceded by a week the arrest of the Moderates. When the
+seizure of Danton had once before been discussed in the Committee,
+Robespierre resisted the proposal violently. We have already seen how he
+defended Danton at the Jacobin Club, when the Club underwent the process
+of purification in the winter. What produced this sudden tack? How came
+Robespierre to assent in March to a violence which he had angrily
+discountenanced in February? There had been no change in the policy or
+attitude of Danton himself. The military operations against the domestic
+and foreign enemies were no sooner fairly in the way of success, than
+Danton began to meditate in serious earnest the consolidation of a
+republican system of law and justice. He would fain have stayed the
+Terror. 'Let us leave something,' he said, 'to the guillotine of
+opinion.' He aided, no doubt, in the formation of the Revolutionary
+Tribunal, but this was exactly in harmony with his usual policy of
+controlling popular violence without alienating the strength of popular
+sympathy. The process of the tribunal was rough and summary, but it was
+fairer--until Robespierre's Law of Prairial--than people usually
+suppose, and it was the very temple of the goddess of Justice herself
+compared with the September massacres. 'Let us prove ourselves
+terrible,' Danton said, 'to relieve the people from the necessity of
+being so.' His activity had been incessant in urging and superintending
+the great levies against the foreigner; he had gone repeatedly on
+distant and harassing expeditions, as the representative of the
+Convention at the camps on the frontier. In the midst of all this he
+found time to press forward measures for the instruction of the young,
+and for the due appointment of judges, and his head was full of ideas
+for the construction of a permanent executive council. It was this which
+made him eager for a cessation of the method of Terror, and it was this
+which made the Committee of Public Safety his implacable enemy.
+
+Why, then, did Robespierre, who also passed as a man of order and
+humanity, not continue to support Danton after the suppression of the
+Hébertists, as he had supported him before? The common and facile answer
+is that he was moved by a malignant desire to put a rival out of the
+way. On the whole, the evidence seems to support Napoleon's opinion that
+Robespierre was incapable of voting for the death of anybody in the
+world on grounds of personal enmity. And his acquiescence in the ruin of
+Danton is intelligible enough on the grounds of selfish policy. The
+Committee hated Danton for the good reason that he had openly attacked
+them, and his cry for clemency was an inflammatory and dangerous protest
+against their system. Now Robespierre, rightly or wrongly, had made up
+his mind that the Committee was the instrument by which, and which only,
+he could work out his own vague schemes of power and reconstruction.
+And, in any case, how could he resist the Committee? The famous
+insurrectionary force of Paris, which Danton had been the first to
+organise against a government, had just been chilled by the fall of the
+Hébertists. Least of all could this force be relied upon to rise in
+defence of the very chief whose every word for many weeks past had been
+a protest against the Communal leaders. In separating himself from the
+Ultras, Danton had cut off the great reservoir of his peculiar strength.
+
+It may be said that the Convention was the proper centre of resistance
+to the designs of the Committee, and that if Danton and Robespierre had
+united their forces in the Convention they would have defeated Billaud
+and his allies. This seems to us more than doubtful. The Committee had
+acquired an immense preponderance over the Convention. They had been
+eminently successful in the immense tasks imposed upon them. They had
+the prestige not only of being the government--so great a thing in a
+country that had just emerged from the condition of a centralised
+monarchy; they had also the prestige of being a government that had done
+its work triumphantly. We are now in March. In July we shall find that
+Robespierre adopted the very policy that we are now discussing, of
+playing off the Convention against the Committee. In July that policy
+ended in his headlong fall. Why should it have been any more successful
+four months earlier?
+
+What we may say is, that Robespierre was bound in all morality to defend
+Danton in the Convention at every hazard. Possibly so; but then to run
+risks for chivalry's sake was not in Robespierre's nature, and no man
+can climb out beyond the limitations of his own character. His narrow
+head and thin blood and instable nerve, his calculating humour and his
+frigid egoism, disinclined him to all games of chance. His apologists
+have sought to put a more respectable colour on his abandonment of
+Danton. The precisian, they say, disapproved of Danton's lax and
+heedless courses. Danton said to him one day:--'What do I care? Public
+opinion is a strumpet, and posterity a piece of nonsense.' How should
+the puritanical lawyer endure such cynicism as this? And Danton
+delighted in inflicting these coarse shocks. Again, Danton had given
+various gross names of contempt to Saint Just. Was Robespierre not to
+feel insults offered to the ablest and most devoted of his lieutenants?
+What was more important than all, the acclamations with which the
+partisans of reaction greeted the fall of the Ultras, made it necessary
+to give instant and unmistakable notice to the foes of the Revolution
+that the goddess of the scorching eye and fiery hand still grasped the
+axe of her vengeance.
+
+These are pleas invented after the fact. All goes to show that
+Robespierre was really moved by nothing more than his invariable dread
+of being left behind, of finding himself on the weaker side, of not
+seeming practical and political enough. And having made up his mind that
+the stronger party was bent on the destruction of the Dantonists, he
+became fiercer than Billaud himself. It is constantly seen that the
+waverer, of nervous atrabiliar constitution, no sooner overcomes the
+agony of irresolution, than he flings himself on his object with a
+vindictive tenacity that seems to repay him for all the moral
+humiliation inflicted on him by his stifled doubts. He redeems the
+slowness of his approach by the fury of his spring. 'Robespierre,' says
+M. d'Héricault, 'precipitated himself to the front of the opinion that
+was yelling against his friends of yesterday. In order to keep his usual
+post in the van of the Revolution, in order to secure the advantage to
+his own popularity of an execution which the public voice seemed to
+demand, he came forward as the author of that execution, though only the
+day before he had hesitated about its utility, and though it was, in
+truth far less useful to him than it proved to be to his future
+antagonists.'
+
+Robespierre first alarmed Danton's friends by assuming a certain icy
+coldness of manner, and by some menacing phrases about the faction of
+the so-called Moderates. Danton had gone, as he often did, to his native
+village of Arcis-sur-Aube, to seek repose and a little clearness of
+sight in the night that wrapped him about. He was devoid of personal
+ambition; he never had any humour for mere factious struggles. His,
+again, was the temperament of violent force, and in such types the
+reaction is always tremendous. The indomitable activity of the last
+twenty months had bred weariness of spirit. The nemesis of a career of
+strenuous Will in large natures is apt to be a sudden sense of the irony
+of things. In Danton, as with Byron it happened afterwards, the
+vehemence of the revolutionary spirit was touched by this desolating
+irony. His friends tried to rouse him. It is not clear that he could
+have done anything. The balance of force, after the suppression of the
+Hébertists, was irretrievably against him, as calculation had already
+revealed to Robespierre.
+
+There are various stories of the pair having met at dinner almost on the
+eve of Danton's arrest, and parting with sombre disquietude on both
+sides. The interview, with its champagne, its interlocutors, its play of
+sinister repartee, may possibly have taken place, but the alleged
+details are plainly apocryphal. After all, 'Religion ist in der Thiere
+Trieb,' says Wallenstein; 'the very savage drinks not with the victim,
+into whose breast he means to plunge a sword.' Danton was warned that
+Robespierre was plotting his arrest. 'If I thought he had the bare
+idea,' said Danton with something of Gargantuan hyperbole, 'I would eat
+his bowels out.' Such was the disdain with which the 'giant of the
+mighty bone and bold emprise' thought of our meagre-hearted pedant. The
+truth is that in the stormy and distracted times of politics, and
+perhaps in all times, contempt is a dangerous luxury. A man may be a
+very poor creature, and still have a faculty for mischief. And
+Robespierre had this faculty in the case of Danton. With singular
+baseness, he handed over to Saint Just a collection of notes, to serve
+as material for the indictment which Saint Just was to present to the
+Convention. They comprised everything that suspicion could interpret
+malignantly, from the most conspicuous acts of Danton's public life,
+down to the casual freedom of private discourse.
+
+Another infamy was to follow. After the arrest, and on the proceedings
+to obtain the assent of the Convention to the trial of Danton and others
+of its members, one only of their friends had the courage to rise and
+demand that they should be heard at the bar. Robespierre burst out in
+cold rage; he asked whether they had undergone so many heroic
+sacrifices, counting among them these acts of 'painful severity,' only
+to fall under the yoke of a band of domineering intriguers; and he cried
+out impatiently that they would brook no claim of privilege, and suffer
+no rotten idol. The word was felicitously chosen, for the Convention
+dreaded to have its independence suspected, and it dreaded this all the
+more because at this time its independence did not really exist. The
+vote against Danton was unanimous, and the fact that it was so is the
+deepest stain on the fame of this assembly. On the afternoon of the
+Sixteenth Germinal (April 5, 1794) Paris in amazement and some
+stupefaction saw the once-dreaded Titan of the Mountain fast bound in
+the tumbril, and faring towards the sharp-clanging knife. 'I leave it
+all in a frightful welter,' Danton is reported to have said. 'Not a man
+of them has an idea of government. Robespierre will follow me; he is
+dragged down by me. Ah, better be a poor fisherman than meddle with the
+governing of men!'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let us pause for a moment over a calmer reminiscence. This was the very
+day on which the virtuous and high-minded Condorcet quitted the friendly
+roof that for nine months had concealed him from the search of
+proscription. The same week he was found dead in his prison. While
+Danton was storming with impotent thunder before the tribunal, Condorcet
+was writing those closing words of his Sketch of Human Progress, which
+are always so full of strength and edification. 'How this picture of the
+human race freed from all its fetters,--withdrawn from the empire of
+chance, as from that of the enemies of progress, and walking with firm
+and assured step in the way of truth, of virtue, and happiness, presents
+to the philosopher a sight that consoles him for the errors, the crimes,
+the injustice, with which the earth is yet stained, and of which he is
+not seldom the victim! It is in the contemplation of this picture that
+he receives the reward of his efforts for the progress of reason, for
+the defence of liberty. He ventures to link them with the eternal chain
+of the destinies of man: it is there he finds the true recompense of
+virtue, the pleasure of having done a lasting good; fate can no longer
+undo it, by any disastrous compensation that shall restore prejudice and
+bondage. This contemplation is for him a refuge, into which the
+recollection of his persecutors can never follow him; in which, living
+in thought with man reinstated in the rights and the dignity of his
+nature, he forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed, by base fear,
+by envy: it is here that he truly abides with his fellows, in an elysium
+that his reason has known how to create for itself, and that his love
+for humanity adorns with all purest delights.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In following the turns of the drama which was to end in the tragedy of
+Thermidor, we perceive that after the fall of the anarchists and the
+death of Danton, the relations between Robespierre and the Committees
+underwent a change. He, who had hitherto been on the side of government,
+became in turn an agency of opposition. He did this in the interest of
+ultimate stability, but the difference between the new position and the
+old is that he now distinctly associated the idea of a stable republic
+with the ascendency of his own religious conceptions. How far the
+ascendency of his own personality was involved, we have no means of
+judging. The vulgar accusation against him is that he now deliberately
+aimed at a dictatorship, and began to plot with that end in view. It is
+always the most difficult thing in the world to draw a line between mere
+arrogant egoism on the one hand, and on the other the identification of
+a man's personal elevation with the success of his public cause. The two
+ends probably become mixed in his mind, and if the cause be a good one,
+it is the height of pharisaical folly to quarrel with him, because he
+desires that his authority and renown shall receive some of the lustre
+of a far-shining triumph. What we complain of in Napoleon Bonaparte, for
+instance, is not that he sought power, but that he sought it in the
+interests of a coarse, brutal, and essentially unmeaning personal
+ambition. And so of Robespierre. We need not discuss the charge that he
+sought to make himself master. The important thing is that his mastery
+could have served no great end for France; that it would have been like
+himself, poor, barren, and hopelessly mediocre. And this would have been
+seen on every side. France had important military tasks to perform
+before her independence was assured. Robespierre hated war, and was
+jealous of every victory. France was in urgent need of stable
+government, of new laws, of ordered institutions. Robespierre never said
+a word to indicate that he had a single positive idea in his head on any
+of these great departments. And, more than this, he was incapable of
+making use of men who were more happily endowed than himself. He had
+never mastered that excellent observation of De Retz, that of all the
+qualities of a good party chief, none is so indispensable as being able
+to suppress on many occasions, and to hide on all, even legitimate
+suspicions. He was corroded by suspicion, and this paralyses able
+servants. Finally, Robespierre had no imperial quality of soul, but only
+that very sorry imitation of it, a lively irritability.
+
+The base of Robespierre's schemes of social reconstruction now came
+clearly into view; and what a base! An official Supreme Being, and a
+regulated Terror. The one was to fill up the spiritual void, and the
+other to satisfy all the exigencies of temporal things. It is to the
+credit of Robespierre's perspicacity that he should have recognised the
+human craving for religion, but this credit is as naught when we
+contemplate the jejune thing that passed for religion in his dim and
+narrow understanding. Rousseau had brought a new soul into the
+eighteenth century by the Savoyard Vicar's Profession of Faith, the most
+fervid and exalted expression of emotional deism that religious
+literature contains; vague, irrational, incoherent, cloudy; but the
+clouds are suffused with glowing gold. When we turn from that to the
+political version of it in Robespierre's discourse on the relations of
+religious and moral ideas with republican principles, we feel as one who
+revisits a landscape that had been made glorious to him by a summer sky
+and fresh liquid winds from the gates of the evening sun, only to find
+it dead under a gray heaven and harsh blasts from the northeast.
+Robespierre's words on the Supreme Being are never a brimming stream of
+deep feeling; they are a literary concoction: never the self-forgetting
+expansion of the religious soul, but only the composite of the
+rhetorician. He thought he had a passion for religion; what he took for
+religion was little more than mental decorum. We do not mean that he was
+insincere, or that he was without a feeling for high things. But here,
+as in all else, his aspiration was far beyond his faculty; he yearned
+for great spiritual emotions, as he had yearned for great thoughts and
+great achievements, but his spiritual capacity was as scanty and obscure
+as his intelligence. And where unkind Nature thus unequally yokes lofty
+objects in a man with a short mental reach, she stamps him with the very
+definition of mediocrity.
+
+How can we speak with decent patience of a man who seriously thought
+that he should conciliate the conservative and theological elements of
+the society at his feet, by such an odious opera-piece as the Feast of
+the Supreme Being? This was designed as a triumphant ripost to the Feast
+of Reason, which Chaumette and his friends had celebrated in the winter.
+The energumens of the Goddess of Reason had now been some weeks in
+their bloody graves; by this time, if they had given the wrong answer to
+the supreme enigma, their eyes would perhaps be opened. Robespierre
+persuaded the Convention to decree an official recognition of the
+Supreme Being, and to attend a commemorative festival in honour of their
+mystic patron. He contrived to be chosen president for the decade in
+which the festival would fall. When the day came (20th Prairial, June 8,
+1794), he clothed himself with more than even his usual care. As he
+looked out from the windows of the Tuileries upon the jubilant crowd in
+the gardens, he was intoxicated with enthusiasm. 'O Nature,' he cried,
+'how sublime thy power, how full of delight! How tyrants must grow pale
+at the idea of such a festival as this!' In pontifical pride he walked
+at the head of the procession, with flowers and wheat-ears in his hand,
+to the sound of chants and symphonies and choruses of maidens. On the
+first of the great basins in the gardens, David, the artist, had devised
+an allegorical structure for which an inauspicious doom was prepared.
+Atheism, a statue of life size, was throned in the midst of an amiable
+group of human Vices, with Madness by her side, and Wisdom menacing them
+with lofty wrath. Great are the perils of symbolism. Robespierre applied
+a torch to Atheism, but alas, the wind was hostile, or else Atheism and
+Madness were damp. They obstinately resisted the torch, and it was
+hapless Wisdom who took fire. Her face, all blackened by smoke, grinned
+a hideous ghastly grin at her sturdy rivals. The miscarriage of the
+allegory was an evil omen, and men probably thought how much better the
+churchmen always managed their conjurings and the art of spectacle.
+There was a great car drawn by milk-white oxen; in the front were ranged
+sheaves of golden grain, while at the back shepherds and shepherdesses
+posed with scenic graces. The whole mummery was pagan. It was a bringing
+back of Cerealia and Thesmophoria to earth. It stands as the most
+disgusting and contemptible anachronism in history.
+
+The famous republican Calendar, with its Prairials and Germinals, its
+Ventoses and Pluvioses, was an anachronism of the same kind, though it
+was less despicable in its manifestation. Its philosophic base was just
+as retrograde and out of season as the fooleries of the Feast of the
+Supreme Being. The association of worship and sacredness with the fruits
+of the earth, with the forces of nature, with the power and variety of
+the elements, could only be sincere so long as men really thought of all
+these things as animated each by a special will of its own. Such an
+association became mere charlatanry, when knowledge once passed into the
+positive stage. How could men go back to adore an outer world, after
+they had found out the secret that it is a mere huge group of phenomena,
+following fixed courses, and not obeying spontaneous and unaccountable
+volitions of their own? And what could be more puerile than the fanciful
+connection of the Supreme Being with a pastoral simplicity of life? This
+simplicity was gone, irrecoverably gone, with the passage from nomad
+times to the complexities of a modern society. To typify, therefore, the
+Supreme Being as specially interested in shocks of grain and in
+shepherds and shepherdesses was to make him a mere figure in an idyll,
+the ornament of a rural mask, a god of the garden, instead of the
+sovereign director of the universal forces, and stern master of the
+destinies of men. Chaumette's commemoration of the Divinity of Reason
+was a sensible performance, compared with Robespierre's farcical
+repartee. It was something, as Comte has said, to select for worship
+man's most individual attribute. If they could not contemplate society
+as a whole, it was at least a gain to pay homage to that faculty in the
+human rulers of the world, which had brought the forces of nature--its
+pluviosity, nivosity, germinality, and vendemiarity--under the yoke for
+the service of men.
+
+If the philosophy of Robespierre's pageant was so retrograde and false,
+its politics were still more inane. It is a monument of presumptuous
+infatuation that any one should feel so strongly as he did that order
+could only be restored on condition of coming to terms with religious
+use and prejudice, and then that he should dream that his Supreme
+Being--a mere didactic phrase, the deity of a poet's georgic--should
+adequately replace that eternal marvel of construction, by means of
+which the great churchmen had wrought dogma and liturgy and priest and
+holy office into every hour and every mood of men's lives. There is no
+binding principle of human association in a creed with this one bald
+article. 'In truth,' as I have said elsewhere of such deism as
+Robespierre's, 'one can scarcely call it a creed. It is mainly a name
+for a particular mood of fine spiritual exaltation; the expression of a
+state of indefinite aspiration and supreme feeling for lofty things. Are
+you going to convert the new barbarians of our western world with this
+fair word of emptiness? Will you sweeten the lives of suffering men, and
+take its heaviness from that droning piteous chronicle of wrong and
+cruelty and despair, which everlastingly saddens the compassionating ear
+like moaning of a midnight sea; will you animate the stout of heart with
+new fire, and the firm of hand with fresh joy of battle, by the thought
+of a being without intelligible attributes, a mere abstract creation of
+metaphysic, whose mercy is not as our mercy, nor his justice as our
+justice, nor his fatherhood as the fatherhood of men? It was not by a
+cold, a cheerless, a radically depraving conception such as this, that
+the church became the refuge of humanity in the dark times of old, but
+by the representation, to men sitting in bondage and confusion, of
+godlike natures moving among them, under figure of the most eternally
+touching of human relations,--a tender mother ever interceding for them,
+and an elder brother laying down his life that their burdens might be
+loosened.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the day of the Feast of the Supreme Being, the guillotine was
+concealed in the folds of rich hangings. It was the Twentieth of
+Prairial. Two days later Couthon proposed to the Convention the
+memorable Law of the Twenty-second Prairial. Robespierre was the
+draftsman, and the text of it still remains in his own writing. This
+monstrous law is simply the complete abrogation of all law. Of all laws
+ever passed in the world it is the most nakedly iniquitous. Tyrants have
+often substituted their own will for the ordered procedure of a
+tribunal, but no tyrant before ever went through the atrocious farce of
+deliberately making a tribunal the organised negation of security for
+justice. Couthon laid its theoretic base in a fallacy that must always
+be full of seduction to shallow persons in authority: 'He who would
+subordinate the public safety to the inventions of jurisconsults, to the
+formulas of the Court, is either an imbecile or a scoundrel.' As if
+public safety could mean anything but the safety of the public. The
+author of the Law of Prairial had forgotten the minatory word of the
+sage to whom he had gone on a pilgrimage in the days of his youth. 'All
+becomes legitimate and even virtuous,' Helvétius had written, 'on behalf
+of the public safety.' Rousseau inscribed on the margin, 'The public
+safety is nothing, unless individuals enjoy security.' What security was
+possible under the Law of Prairial?
+
+After the probity and good judgment of the tribunal, the two cardinal
+guarantees in state trials are accurate definition, and proof. The
+offence must be capable of precise description, and the proof against
+an offender must conform to strict rule. The Law of Prairial violently
+infringed all three of these essential conditions of judicial equity.
+First, the number of the jury who had power to convict was reduced.
+Second, treason was made to consist in such vague and infinitely elastic
+kinds of action as inspiring discouragement, misleading opinion,
+depraving manners, corrupting patriots, abusing the principles of the
+Revolution by perfidious applications. Third, proof was to lie in the
+conscience of the jury; there was an end of preliminary inquiry, of
+witnesses in defence, and of counsel for the accused. Any kind of
+testimony was evidence, whether material or moral, verbal or written, if
+it was of a kind 'likely to gain the assent of a man of reasonable
+mind.'
+
+Now what was Robespierre's motive in devising this infernal instrument?
+The theory that he loved judicial murder for its own sake, can only be
+held by the silliest of royalist or clerical partisans. It is like the
+theory of the vulgar kind of Protestantism, that Mary Tudor or Philip of
+Spain had a keen delight in shedding blood. Robespierre, like Mary and
+like Philip, would have been as well pleased if all the world would have
+come round to his mind without the destruction of a single life. The
+true inquisitor is a creature of policy, not a man of blood by taste.
+What, then, was the policy that inspired the Law of Prairial? To us the
+answer seems clear. We know what was the general aim in Robespierre's
+mind at this point in the history of the Revolution. His brother
+Augustin was then the representative of the Convention with the army of
+Italy, and General Bonaparte was on terms of close intimacy with him.
+Bonaparte said long afterwards, when he was expiating a life of iniquity
+on the rock of Saint Helena, that he saw long letters from Maximilian to
+Augustin Robespierre, all blaming the Conventional Commissioners--Tallien,
+Fouché, Barras, Collot, and the rest--for the horrors they perpetrated,
+and accusing them of ruining the Revolution by their atrocities. Again,
+there is abundant testimony that Robespierre did his best to induce the
+Committee of Public Safety to bring those odious malefactors to justice.
+The text of the Law itself discloses the same object. The vague phrases of
+depraving manners and applying revolutionary principles perfidiously, were
+exactly calculated to smite the band of violent men whose conduct was to
+Robespierre the scandal of the Revolution. And there was a curious clause
+in the law as originally presented, which deprived the Convention of the
+right of preventing measures against its own members. Robespierre's general
+design in short was to effect a further purgation of the Convention. There
+is no reason to suppose that he deliberately aimed at any more general
+extermination. On the other hand, it is incredible that, as some have
+maintained, he should merely have had in view the equalisation of rich and
+poor before the tribunals, by withdrawing the aid of counsel and testimony
+to civic character from both rich and poor alike.
+
+If Robespierre's design was what we believe it to have been, the result
+was a ghastly failure. The Committee of Public Safety would not consent
+to apply his law against the men for whom he had specially designed it.
+The frightful weapon which he had forged was seized by the Committee of
+General Security, and Paris was plunged into the fearful days of the
+Great Terror. The number of persons put to death by the Revolutionary
+Tribunal before the Law of Prairial had been comparatively moderate.
+From the creation of the tribunal in April 1793, down to the execution
+of the Hébertists in March 1794, the number of persons condemned to
+death was 505. From the death of the Hébertists down to the death of
+Robespierre, the number of the condemned was 2158. One half of the
+entire number of victims, namely, 1356, were guillotined after the Law
+of Prairial. No deadlier instrument was ever invented by the cruelty of
+man. Innocent women no less than innocent men, poor no less than rich,
+those in whom life was almost spent, no less than those in whom its
+pulse was strongest, virtuous no less than vicious, were sent off in
+woe-stricken batches all those summer days. A man was informed against;
+he was seized in his bed at five in the morning; at seven he was taken
+to the Conciergerie; at nine he received information of the charge
+against him; at ten he went into the dock; by two in the afternoon he
+was condemned; by four his head lay in the executioner's basket.
+
+What stamps the system of the Terror at this date with a wickedness
+that cannot be effaced, is that at no moment was the danger from foreign
+or domestic foe less serious. We may always forgive something to
+well-grounded panic. The proscriptions of an earlier date in Paris were
+not excessively sanguinary, if we remember that the city abounded in
+royalists and other reactionists, who were really dangerous in fomenting
+discouragement and spreading confusion. If there ever is an excuse for
+martial law, and it must be rare, the French government were warranted
+in resorting to it in 1793. Paris in those days was like a city
+beleaguered, and the world does not use very harsh words about the
+commandant of a besieged town who puts to death traitors found within
+his walls. Opinion in England at this very epoch encouraged the Tory
+government to pass a Treason Bill, which introduced as vague a
+definition of treasonable offence as even the Law of Prairial itself.
+Windham did not shrink from declaring in parliament that he and his
+colleagues were determined to exact 'a rigour beyond the law.' And they
+were as good as their word. The Jacobins had no monopoly either of cruel
+law or cruel breach of law in the eighteenth century. Only thirty years
+before, opinion in Pennsylvania had prompted a hideous massacre of
+harmless Indians as a deed acceptable to God, and the grandson of
+William Penn proclaimed a bounty of fifty dollars for the scalp of a
+female Indian, and three times as much for a male. A man would have had
+quite as good a chance of justice from the Revolutionary Tribunal, as
+at the hands of Braxfield, the Scotch judge, who condemned Muir and
+Palmer for sedition in 1793, and who told the government, with a brazen
+front worthy of Carrier or Collot d'Herbois themselves, that, if they
+would only send him prisoners, he would find law for them.
+
+We have no sympathy with the spirit of paradox that has arisen in these
+days, amusing itself by the vindication of bad men. We think that the
+author of the Law of Prairial was a bad man. But it is time that there
+should be an end of the cant which lifts up its hands at the crimes of
+republicans and freethinkers, and shuts its eyes to the crimes of kings
+and churches. Once more, we ought to rise into a higher air; we ought to
+condemn, wherever we find it, whether on the side of our adversaries or
+on our own, all readiness to substitute arbitrary force for the
+processes of ordered justice. There are moments when such a readiness
+may be leniently judged, but Prairial of 1794 was not one of them either
+in France or in England. And what makes the crime of this law more
+odious, is its association with the official proclamation of the State
+worship of a Supreme Being. The scene of Robespierre's holy festival
+becomes as abominable as a catholic Auto-da-fé, where solemn homage was
+offered to the God of pity and loving-kindness, while flame glowed round
+the limbs of the victims.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Robespierre was inflamed with resentment, not because so many people
+were guillotined every day, but because the objects of his own enmity
+were not among them. He was chagrined at the miscarriage of his scheme;
+but the chagrin had its root in his desire for order, and not in his
+humanity. A good man--say so imperfectly good a man as Danton--could not
+have endured life, after enacting such a law, and seeing the ghastly
+work that it was doing. He could hardly have contented himself with
+drawing tears from the company in Madame Duplay's little parlour, by his
+pathetic recitations from Corneille and Racine, or with listening to
+melting notes from the violin of Le Bas. It is commonly said by
+Robespierre's defenders that he withdrew from the Committee of Public
+Safety, as soon as he found out that he was powerless to arrest the
+daily shedding of blood. The older assumption used to be that he left
+Paris, and ceased to be cognisant of the Committee's deliberations. The
+minutes, however, prove that this was not the case. Robespierre signed
+papers nearly every day of Messidor--(June 19 to July 18) the
+blood-stained month between Prairial and Thermidor--and was thoroughly
+aware of the doings of the Committee. His partisans have now fallen back
+on the singular theory of what they style moral absence. He was present
+in the flesh, but standing aloof in the spirit. His frowning silence was
+a deadlier rebuke to the slayers and oppressors than secession.
+Unfortunately for this ingenious explanation of the embarrassing fact of
+a merciful man standing silent before merciless doings, there are at
+least two facts that show its absurdity.
+
+First, there is the affair of Catherine Théot. Catherine Théot was a
+crazy old woman of a type that is commoner in protestant than in
+catholic countries. She believed herself to have special gifts in the
+interpretation of the holy writings, and a few other people as crazy as
+herself chose to accept her pretensions. One revelation vouchsafed to
+her was to the effect that Robespierre was a Messiah and the new
+redeemer of the human race. The Committee of General Security resolved
+to indict this absurd sect. Vadier,--one of the roughest of the men whom
+the insurrections of Paris had brought to the front--reported on the
+charges to the Convention (27 Prairial, June 15), and he took the
+opportunity to make Robespierre look profoundly ridiculous. The
+unfortunate Messiah sat on his bench, gnawing his lips with bitter rage,
+while, amid the sneers and laughter of the Convention, the officers
+brought to the bar the foolish creatures who had called him the Son of
+God. His thin pride and prudish self-respect were unutterably affronted,
+and he quite understood that the ridicule of the mysticism of Théot was
+an indirect pleasantry upon his own Supreme Being. He flew to the
+Committee of Public Safety, angrily reproached them for permitting the
+prosecution, summoned Fouquier-Tinville, and peremptorily ordered him to
+let the matter drop. In vain did the public prosecutor point out that
+there was a decree of the Convention ordering him to proceed.
+Robespierre was inexorable. The Committee of General Security were
+baffled, and the prosecution ended. 'Lutteur impuissant et fatigué,'
+says M. Hamel, the most thoroughgoing defender of Robespierre, upon
+this, 'il va se retirer, moralement du moins.' Impotent and wearied! But
+he had just won a most signal victory for good sense and humanity. Why
+was it the only one? If Robespierre was able to save Théot, why could he
+not save Cécile Renault?
+
+Cécile Renault was a young seamstress who was found one evening at the
+door of Robespierre's lodging, calling out in a state of exaltation that
+she would fain see what a tyrant looked like. She was arrested, and upon
+her were found two little knives used for the purposes of her trade.
+That she should be arrested and imprisoned was natural enough. The times
+were charged with deadly fire. People had not forgotten that Marat had
+been murdered in his own house. Only a few days before Cécile Renault's
+visit to Robespierre, an assassin had fired a pistol at Collot d'Herbois
+on the staircase of his apartment. We may make allowance for the
+excitement of the hour, and Robespierre had as much right to play the
+martyr, as had Lewis the Fifteenth after the incident of Damiens' rusty
+pen-knife. But the histrionic exigencies of the chief of a faction ought
+not to be pushed too far. And it was a monstrous crime that because
+Robespierre found it convenient to pose as sacrificial victim at the
+Club, therefore he should have had no scruple in seeing not only the
+wretched Cécile, but her father, her aunt, and one of her brothers, all
+despatched to the guillotine in the red shirt of parricide, as agents of
+Pitt and Coburg, and assassins of the father of the land. This was
+exactly two days after he had shown his decisive power in the affair of
+the religious illuminists. The only possible conclusion open to a plain
+man after weighing and putting aside all the sophisms with which this
+affair has been obscured, is that Robespierre interfered in the one case
+because its further prosecution would have tended to make him
+ridiculous, and he did not interfere in the other, because the more
+exaggerated, the more melodramatic, the more murderous it was made, the
+more interesting an object would he seem in the eyes of his adorers.
+
+The second fact bearing on Robespierre's humanity is this. He had
+encouraged the formation and stimulated the activity of popular
+commissions, who should provide victims for the Revolutionary Tribunal.
+On the Second of Messidor (June 20) a list containing one hundred and
+thirty-eight names was submitted for the ratification of the Committee.
+The Committee endorsed the bloody document, and the last signature of
+the endorsement is that of him, who had resigned a post in his youth
+rather than be a party to putting a man to death. As was observed at the
+time, Robespierre in doing this, suppressed his pique against his
+colleagues, in order to take part in a measure, that was a sort of
+complement to his Law of Prairial.
+
+From these two circumstances, then, even if there were no other, we are
+justified in inferring that Robespierre was struck by no remorse at the
+thought that it was his law which had unbound the hands of the horrible
+genie of civil murder. His mind was wholly absorbed in the calculations
+of a frigid egoism. His intelligence, as we have always to remember, was
+very dim. He only aimed at one thing at once, and that was seldom
+anything very great or far-reaching. He was a man of peering and
+obscured vision in face of practical affairs. In passing the Law of
+Prairial, his designs--and they were meritorious and creditable designs
+enough in themselves--had been directed against the corrupt chiefs, such
+as Tallien and Fouché, and against the fierce and coarse spirits of the
+Committee of General Security, such as Vadier and Voulland. Robespierre
+was above all things a precisian. He had a sentimental sympathy with the
+common people in the abstract, but his spiritual pride, his pedantry,
+his formalism, his personal fastidiousness, were all wounded to the very
+quick by the kind of men whom the Revolution had thrown to the surface.
+Gouverneur Morris, then the American minister, describes most of the
+members of the two Committees as the very dregs of humanity, with whom
+it is a stain to have any dealings; as degraded men only worthy of the
+profoundest contempt. Danton had said: 'Robespierre is the least of a
+scoundrel of any of the band.' The Committee of General Security
+represented the very elements by which Robespierre was most revolted.
+They offended his respectability; their evil manners seemed to tarnish
+that good name which his vanity hoped to make as revered all over
+Europe, as it already was among his partisans in France. It was
+indispensable therefore to cut them off from the revolutionary
+government, just as Hébert and as Danton had been cut off. His
+colleagues of Public Safety refused to lend themselves to this.
+Henceforth, with characteristically narrow tenacity, he looked round for
+new combinations, but, so far as I can see, with no broader design than
+to enable him to punish these particular objects of his very just
+detestation.
+
+The position of sections and interests which ended in the Revolution of
+Thermidor, is one of the most extraordinarily intricate and entangled in
+the history of faction. It would take a volume to follow out all the
+peripeteias of the drama. Here we can only enumerate in a few sentences
+the parties to the contest and the conditions of the game. The reader
+will easily discern the difficulty in Robespierre's way of making an
+effective combination. First, there were the two Committees. Of these
+the one, the General Security, was thoroughly hostile to Robespierre;
+its members, as we have said, were wild and hardy spirits, with no
+political conception, and with a great contempt for fine phrases and
+philosophical principles. They knew Robespierre's hatred for them, and
+they heartily returned it. They were the steadfast centre of the
+changing schemes which ended in his downfall. The Committee of Public
+Safety was divided. Carnot hated Saint Just, and Collot d'Herbois hated
+Robespierre, and Billaud had a sombre distrust of Robespierre's
+counsels. Shortly speaking, the object of the Billaudists was to retain
+their power, and their power was always menaced from two quarters, the
+Convention and Paris. If they let Robespierre have his own way against
+his enemies, would they not be at his mercy whenever he chose to devise
+a popular insurrection against them? Yet if they withstood Robespierre,
+they could only do so through the agency of the Convention, and to fall
+back upon the Convention would be to give that body an express
+invitation to resume the power that had, in the pressure of the crisis a
+year before, been delegated to the Committee, and periodically renewed
+afterwards. The dilemma of Billaud seemed desperate, and events
+afterwards proved that it was so.
+
+If we turn to the Convention, we find the position equally distracting.
+They, too, feared another insurrection and a second decimation. If the
+Right helped Robespierre to destroy the Fouchés and Vadiers, he would be
+stronger than ever; and what security had they against a repetition of
+the violence of the Thirty-first of May? If the Dantonists joined in
+destroying Robespierre, they would be helping the Right, and what
+security had they against a Girondin reaction? On the other hand, the
+Centre might fairly hope, just what Billaud feared, that if the
+Committee came to the Convention to crush Robespierre, that would end in
+a combination strong enough to enable the Convention to crush the
+Committees.
+
+Much depended on military success. The victories of the generals were
+the great strength of the Committee. For so long it would be difficult
+to turn opinion against a triumphant administration. 'At the first
+defeat,' Robespierre had said to Barère, 'I await you.' But the defeat
+did not come. The plotting went on with incessant activity; on one hand,
+Robespierre, aided by Saint Just and Couthon, strengthening himself at
+the Jacobin Club, and through that among the sections; on the other, the
+Mountain and the Committee of General Security trying to win over the
+Right, more contemptuously christened the Marsh or the Belly, of the
+Convention. The Committee of Public Safety was not yet fully decided how
+to act.
+
+At the end of the first week of Thermidor, Robespierre could endure the
+tension no longer. He had tried to fortify his nerves for the struggle
+by riding, but with so little success that he was lifted off his horse
+fainting. He endeavoured to steady himself by diligent pistol-practice.
+But nothing gave him initiative and the sinews of action. Saint Just
+urged him to raise Paris. Some bold men proposed to carry off the
+members of the Committee bodily from their midnight deliberations.
+Robespierre declined, and fell back on what he took to be his greatest
+strength and most unfailing resource; he prepared a speech. On the
+Eighth of Thermidor he delivered it to the Convention, amid intense
+excitement both within its walls and without. All Paris knew that they
+were now on the eve of one more of the famous Days; the revolution of
+Thermidor had begun.
+
+The speech of the Eighth Thermidor has seemed to men of all parties
+since a masterpiece of tactical ineptitude. If Robespierre had been a
+statesman instead of a phrasemonger, he had a clear course. He ought to
+have taken the line of argument that Danton would have taken. That is to
+say, he ought to have identified himself fully with the interests and
+security of the Convention; to have accepted the growing resolution to
+close the Terror; to have boldly pressed the abolition of the Committee
+of General Security, and the removal from the Committee of Public Safety
+of Billaud, Collot, Barère; to have proposed to send about fifty persons
+to Cayenne for life; and to have urged a policy of peace with the
+foreign powers. This was the substantial wisdom and real interest of the
+position. The task was difficult, because his hearers had the best
+possible reasons for knowing that the author of the Law of Prairial was
+a Terrorist on principle. And in truth we know that Robespierre had no
+definite intention of erecting clemency into a rule. He had not mental
+strength enough to throw off the profound apprehension, which the
+incessant alarms of the last five years had engendered in him; and the
+only device, that he could imagine for maintaining the republic against
+traitors, was to stimulate the rigour of the Revolutionary Tribunal.
+
+If, however, Robespierre lacked the grasp which might have made him the
+representative of a broad and stable policy, it was at least his
+interest to persuade the men of the Plain that he entertained no designs
+against them. And this is what in his own mind he intended. But to do it
+effectively, it was clearly best to tell his hearers, in so many words,
+whom he really wished them to strike. That would have relieved the
+majority, and banished the suspicion which had been busily fomented by
+his enemies, that he had in his pocket a long list of their names, for
+proscription. But Robespierre, having for the first time in his life
+ventured on aggressive action without the support of a definite party,
+faltered. He dared not to designate his enemies face to face and by
+name. Instead of that, he talked vaguely of conspirators against the
+republic, and calumniators of himself. There was not a single bold,
+definite, unmistakable sentence in the speech from first to last. The
+men of the Plain were insecure and doubtful; they had no certainty that
+among conspirators and calumniators he did not include too many of
+themselves. People are not so readily seized by grand phrases, when
+their heads are at stake. The sitting was long, and marked by changing
+currents and reverses. When they broke up, all was left uncertain.
+Robespierre had suffered a check. Billaud felt that he could no longer
+hesitate in joining the combination against his colleague. Each party
+was aware that the next day must seal the fate of one or other of them.
+There is a legend that in the evening Robespierre walked in the Champs
+Elysées with his betrothed, accompanied as usual by his faithful dog,
+Brount. They admired the purple of the sunset, and talked of the
+prospect of a glorious to-morrow. But this is apocryphal. The evening
+was passed in no lover's saunterings, but amid the storm and uproar of
+the Club. He went to the Jacobins to read over again his speech of the
+day. 'It is my testament of death,' he said, amid the passionate
+protestations of his devoted followers. He had been talking for the last
+three years of his willingness to drink the hemlock, and to offer his
+breast to the poniards of tyrants. That was a fashion of the speech of
+the time, and in earlier days it had been more than a fashion of speech,
+for Brunswick would have given them short shrift. But now, when he
+talked of his last testament, Robespierre did not intend it to be so if
+he could prevent it. When he went to rest that night, he had a tolerably
+calm hope that he should win the next day's battle in the Convention,
+when he was aware that Saint Just would attack the Committees openly and
+directly. If he would have allowed his band to invade the Pavillon de
+Flore, and carry off or slay the Committees who sat up through the
+night, the battle would have been won when he awoke. His friends are
+justified in saying that his strong respect for legality was the cause
+of his ruin.
+
+Men in all ages have had a superstitious fondness for connecting awful
+events in their lives with portents and signs among the outer elements.
+It was noticed that the heat during the terrible days of Thermidor was
+more intense than had been known within the memory of man. The
+thermometer never fell below sixty-five degrees in the coolest part of
+the night, and in the daytime men and women and beasts of burden fell
+down dead in the streets. By five o'clock in the morning of the Ninth
+Thermidor, the galleries of the Convention were filled by a boisterous
+and excited throng. At ten o'clock the proceedings began as usual with
+the reading of correspondence from the departments and from the armies.
+Robespierre, who had been escorted from his lodgings by the usual body
+of admirers, instead of taking his ordinary seat, remained standing by
+the side of the tribune. It is a familiar fact that moments of appalling
+suspense are precisely those in which we are most ready involuntarily to
+note a trifle; everybody observed that Robespierre wore the coat of
+violet-blue silk and the white nankeens in which a few weeks previously
+he had done honour to the Supreme Being.
+
+The galleries seemed as enthusiastic as ever. The men of the Plain and
+the Marsh had lost the abject mien with which they usually cowered
+before Robespierre's glance; they wore a courageous air of judicial
+reserve. The leaders of the Mountain wandered restlessly to and fro
+among the corridors. At noon Tallien saw that Saint Just had ascended
+the tribune. Instantly he rushed down into the chamber, knowing that
+the battle had now begun in fierce earnest. Saint Just had not got
+through two sentences, before Tallien interrupted him. He began to
+insist with energy that there should be an end to the equivocal phrases
+with which Paris had been too long alarmed by the Triumvirate. Billaud,
+fearing to be outdone in the attack, hastily forced his way to the
+tribune, broke into what Tallien was saying, and proceeded dexterously
+to discredit Robespierre's allies without at once assailing Robespierre
+himself. Le Bas ran in a fury to stop him; Collot d'Herbois, the
+president, declared Le Bas out of order; the hall rang with cries of 'To
+prison! To the Abbey!' and Le Bas was driven from the tribune. This was
+the beginning of the tempest. Robespierre's enemies knew that they were
+fighting for their lives, and this inspired them with a strong and
+resolute power that is always impressive in popular assemblies. He still
+thought himself secure. Billaud pursued his accusations. Robespierre, at
+last, unable to control himself, scaled the tribune. There suddenly
+burst forth from Tallien and his partisans vehement shouts of 'Down with
+the tyrant! down with the tyrant!' The galleries were swept by a wild
+frenzy of vague agitation; the president's bell poured loud incessant
+clanging into the tumult; the men of the Plain held themselves firm and
+silent; in the tribune raged ferocious groups, Tallien menacing
+Robespierre with a dagger, Billaud roaring out proposals to arrest this
+person and that Robespierre gesticulating, threatening, yelling,
+shrieking. His enemies knew that if he were once allowed to get a
+hearing, his authority might even yet overawe the waverers. A
+penetrative word or a heroic gesture might lose them the day. The
+majority of the chamber still hesitated. They called for Barère, in
+whose adroit faculty for discovering the winning side they had the
+confidence of long experience. Robespierre, recovering some of his calm,
+and perceiving now that he had really to deal with a serious revolt,
+again asked to be heard before Barère. But the cries for Barère were
+louder than ever. Barère spoke, in a sense hostile to Robespierre, but
+warily and without naming him.
+
+Then there was a momentary lull. The Plain was uncertain. The battle
+might even now turn either way. Robespierre made another attempt to
+speak, but Tallien with intrepid fury broke out into a torrent of louder
+and more vehement invective. Robespierre's shrill voice was heard in
+disjected snatches, amidst the violent tones of Tallien, the yells of
+the president calling Robespierre to order, the murderous clanging of
+the bell. Then came that supreme hour of the struggle, whose tale has
+been so often told, when Robespierre turned from his old allies of the
+Mountain, and succeeded in shrieking out an appeal to the probity and
+virtue of the Right and the Plain. To his horror, even these despised
+men, after a slight movement, remained mute. Then his cheeks blanched,
+and the sweat ran down his face. But anger and scornful impatience
+swiftly came back and restored him. _President of assassins_, he cried
+out to Thuriot, _for the last time I ask to be heard. Thou canst not
+speak_, called one, _the blood of Danton chokes thee_. He flung himself
+down the steps of the tribune, and rushed towards the benches of the
+Right. _Come no further_, cried another, _Vergniaud and Condorcet sat
+here_. He regained the tribune, but his speech was gone. He was reduced
+to the dregs of an impotent and gasping voiceless gesticulation, like
+the strife of one in a nightmare.
+
+The day was lost. The tension of a passionate and violent struggle
+prolonged for many hours always at length exasperates onlookers with
+something of the brute ferocity of the actors. The physical strain stirs
+the tiger in the blood; they conceive a cruel hatred against weakness,
+just as the heated throng of a Roman amphitheatre turned up their thumbs
+for the instant despatch of the unfortunate swordsman who had been too
+ready to lower his arms. The Right, the Plain, even the galleries,
+despised the man who had succumbed. If Robespierre had possessed the
+physical strength of Mirabeau or Danton, the Ninth Thermidor would have
+been another of his victories. He was crushed by the relentless ferocity
+and endurance of his antagonists. A decree for his arrest was resolved
+upon by acclamation. He cast a glance at the galleries, as marvelling
+that they should remain passive in face of an outrage on his person.
+They were mute. The ushers advanced with hesitation to do their duty,
+and not without trembling carried him away, along with Couthon and
+Saint Just. The brother, for whom he had made honourable sacrifices in
+days that seemed to be divided from the present by an abyss of
+centuries, insisted with fine heroism on sharing his fate, and Augustin
+Robespierre and Le Bas were led off to the prisons along with their
+leader and idol.
+
+It was now a little after four o'clock. The Convention, with the
+self-possession that so often amazes us in its proceedings, went on with
+formal business for another hour. At five they broke up. For life, as
+the poets tell, is a daily stage-play; men declaim their high heroic
+parts, then doff the buskin or the sock, wash away the paint from their
+cheeks, and gravely sit down to meat. The Conventionals, as they ate
+their dinners, were unconscious, apparently, that the great crisis of
+the drama was still to come. The next twelve hours were to witness the
+climax. Robespierre had been crushed by the Convention; it remained to
+be seen whether the Convention would not now be crushed by the Commune
+of Paris.
+
+Robespierre was first conducted to the prisons of the Luxembourg. The
+gaoler, on some plea of informality, refused to receive him. The
+terrible prisoner was next taken to the Mairie, where he remained among
+joyful friends from eight in the evening until eleven. Meanwhile the old
+insurrectionary methods of the nights of June and of August in '92, of
+May and of June in '93, were again followed. The beating of the _rappel_
+and the _générale_ was heard in all the sections; the tocsin sounded its
+dreadful note, reminding all who should hear it that insurrection is
+the most sacred and the most indispensable of duties. Hanriot, the
+commandant of the forces, had been arrested in the evening, but he was
+speedily released by the agents of the Commune. The Council issued
+manifestoes and decrees from the Common Hall every moment. The barriers
+were closed. Cannon were posted opposite the doors of the hall of the
+Convention. The quays were thronged. Emissaries sped to and fro between
+the Jacobin Club and the Common Hall, and between these two centres and
+each of the forty-eight sections. It is one of the inscrutable mysteries
+of this delirious night, that Hanriot did not at once use the force at
+his command to break up the Convention. There is no obvious reason why
+he should not have done so. The members of the Convention had
+re-assembled after their dinner, towards seven o'clock. The hall which
+had resounded with the shrieks and yells of the furious gladiators of
+the factions all day, now lent a lugubrious echo to gloomy reports which
+one member after another delivered from the shadow of the tribune.
+Towards nine o'clock the members of the two dread Committees came in
+panic to seek shelter among their colleagues, 'as dejected in their
+peril,' says an eyewitness, 'as they had been cruel and insolent in the
+hour of their supremacy.' When they heard that Hanriot had been
+released, and that guns were at their door, all gave themselves up for
+lost and made ready for death. News came that Robespierre had broken his
+arrest and gone to the Common Hall. Robespierre, after urgent and
+repeated solicitations, had been at length persuaded about an hour
+before midnight to leave the Mairie and join his partisans of the
+Commune. This was an act of revolt against the Convention, for the
+Mairie was a legal place of detention, and so long as he was there, he
+was within the law. The Convention with heroic intrepidity declared both
+Hanriot and Robespierre beyond the pale of the law. This prompt measure
+was its salvation. Twelve members were instantly named to carry the
+decree to all the sections. With the scarf of office round their waists,
+and a sabre in hand, they sallied forth. Mounting horses, and escorted
+by attendants with flaring torches, they scoured Paris, calling all good
+citizens to the succour of the Convention, haranguing crowds at the
+street corners with power and authority, and striking the imaginations
+of men. At midnight heavy rain began to fall.
+
+The leaders of the Commune meanwhile, in full confidence that victory
+was sure, contented themselves with incessant issue of paper decrees, to
+each of which the Convention replied by a counter-decree. Those who have
+studied the situation most minutely, are of opinion that even so late as
+one o'clock in the morning, the Commune might have made a successful
+defence, although it had lost the opportunity, which it had certainly
+possessed up to ten o'clock, of destroying the Convention. But on this
+occasion the genius of insurrection slumbered. And there was a genuine
+division of opinion in the eastern quarters of Paris, the result of a
+grim distrust of the man who had helped to slay Hébert and Chaumette. At
+a word this distrust began to declare itself. The opinion of the
+sections became more and more distracted. One armed group cried, _Down
+with the Convention!_ Another armed group cried, _The Convention for
+ever, and down with the Commune!_ The two great faubourgs were all
+astir, and three battalions were ready to march. Emissaries from the
+Convention actually succeeded in persuading them--such the dementia of
+the night--that Robespierre was a royalist agent, and that the Commune
+were about to deliver the little Lewis from his prison in the Temple.
+One body of communist partisans after another was detached from its
+allegiance. The deluge of rain emptied the Place de Grève, and when
+companies came up from the sections in obedience to orders from Hanriot
+and the Commune, the silence made them suspect a trap, and they withdrew
+towards the great metropolitan church or elsewhere.
+
+Barras, whom the Convention had charged with its military defence,
+gathered together some six thousand men. With the right instinct of a
+man who had studied the history of Paris since the July of 1789, he
+foresaw the advantage of being the first to make the attack. He arranged
+his forces into two divisions. One of them marched along the quays to
+take the Common Hall in front; the other along the Rue Saint Honoré to
+take it in flank. Inside the Common Hall the staircases and corridors
+were alive with bustling messengers, and those mysterious busybodies who
+are always found lingering without a purpose on the skirts of great
+historic scenes. Robespierre and the other chiefs were in a small room,
+preparing manifestoes and signing decrees. They were curiously unaware
+of the movements of the Convention. An aggressive attack by the party of
+authority upon the party of insurrection was unknown in the tradition of
+revolt. They had an easy assurance that at daybreak their forces would
+be prepared once more to tramp along the familiar road westwards. It was
+now half-past two. Robespierre had just signed the first two letters of
+his name to a document before him, when he was startled by cries and
+uproar in the Place below. In a few instants he lay stretched on the
+ground, his jaw shattered by a pistol-shot. His brother had either
+fallen or had leaped out of the window. Couthon was hurled over a
+staircase, and lay for dead. Saint Just was a prisoner.
+
+Whether Robespierre was shot by an officer of the Conventional force, or
+attempted to blow out his own brains, we shall never know, any more than
+we shall ever be quite assured how Rousseau, his spiritual master, came
+to an end. The wounded man was carried, a ghastly sight, first to the
+Committee of Public Safety, and then to the Conciergerie, where he lay
+in silent stupefaction through the heat of the summer day. As he was an
+outlaw, the only legal preliminary before execution was to identify
+him. At five in the afternoon, he was raised into the cart Couthon and
+the younger Robespierre lay, confused wrecks of men, at the bottom of
+it. Hanriot and Saint Just, bruised, begrimed, and foul, completed the
+band. One who walks from the Palace of Justice, over the bridge, along
+the Rue Saint Honoré, into the Rue Royale, and so to the Luxor column,
+retraces the _via dolorosa_ of the Revolution on the afternoon of the
+Tenth of Thermidor.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The end of the intricate manoeuvres known as the Revolution of
+Thermidor was the recovery of authority by the Convention. The
+insurrections, known as the days of the Twelfth Germinal, First
+Prairial, and Thirteenth Vendémiaire, all ended in the victory of the
+Convention over the revolutionary forces of Paris. The Committees, on
+the other hand, had beaten Robespierre, but they had ruined themselves.
+Very gradually the movement towards order, which had begun in the mind
+of Danton, and had gone on in the cloudy purposes of Robespierre, became
+definite. But it was in the interest of very different ideas from those
+of either Danton or of Robespierre. A White Terror succeeded the Red
+Terror. Not at once, however; it was not until nine months after the
+death of Robespierre, that the reaction was strong enough to smite his
+colleagues of the two Committees. The surviving Girondins had come back
+to their seats in the Convention: the Dantonians had not forgiven the
+execution of their chief. These two parties were bent on vengeance. In
+April, 1795, a decree was passed banishing Billaud de Varennes, Collot
+d'Herbois, and Barère. In the following month the leaders of the
+Committee of General Security were thrown into prison. The revolution
+had passed into new currents. We cannot see any reasons for thinking
+that those currents would have led to any happier results if Robespierre
+had won the battle. Tallien, Fouché, Barras, and the rest may have been
+thoroughly bad men. But then what qualities had Robespierre for building
+up a state? He had neither strength of practical character, nor firm
+breadth of political judgment, nor a sound social doctrine. When we
+compare him,--I do not say with Frederick of Prussia, with Jefferson,
+with Washington,--but with the group of able men who made the closing
+year of the Convention honourable and of good service to France, we have
+a measure of Robespierre's profound and pitiable incompetence.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3), by John Morley
+
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+    <title>
+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of Critical miscellanies, Robespierre, by John Morley.
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+<pre>
+
+Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3), by John Morley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3)
+       Essay 1: Robespierre
+
+Author: John Morley
+
+Release Date: March 3, 2007 [EBook #20733]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBESPIERRE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Graeme Mackreth and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<h1>
+CRITICAL<br />
+MISCELLANIES</h1>
+
+<h3>BY</h3>
+
+<h2>JOHN MORLEY</h2>
+
+<h4>VOL. I. Essay 1: Robespierre</h4>
+
+<p style="margin-top: 5em;" class='center'><small>London<br />
+MACMILLAN AND CO., <span class="smcap">Limited</span><br />
+NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY<br />
+1904</small>
+</p>
+
+<h4>CONTENTS OF VOL. I.</h4>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<h4>ROBESPIERRE.</h4>
+
+<h4><a href="#I">I.</a></h4>
+<p>
+<span style="margin-left: 32.5em;">PAGE</span><br />
+<br />
+Introduction <span style="margin-left: 30em;">          <a href="#Page_1">1</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Different views of Robespierre <span style="margin-left: 23em;">      <a href="#Page_4">4</a></span><br />
+<br />
+His youthful history   <span style="margin-left: 27.25em;">             <a href="#Page_5">5</a></span><br />
+<br />
+An advocate at Arras  <span style="margin-left: 26.5em;">             <a href="#Page_7">7</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Acquaintance with Carnot   <span style="margin-left: 24.25em;">         <a href="#Page_10">10</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The summoning of the States-General <span style="margin-left: 20em;">   <a href="#Page_11">11</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Prophecies of revolution    <span style="margin-left: 25em;">       <a href="#Page_12">12</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Reforming Ministers tried and dismissed   <span style="margin-left: 19.25em;">      <a href="#Page_13">13</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Financial state of France   <span style="margin-left: 25em;">     <a href="#Page_14">14</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Impotence of the Monarchy <span style="margin-left: 23.75em;">     <a href="#Page_17">17</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The Constituent Assembly  <span style="margin-left: 24.5em;">    <a href="#Page_19">19</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Robespierre interprets the revolutionary movement rightly  <span style="margin-left: 13em;"> <a href="#Page_21">21</a></span> <br />
+<br />
+The Sixth of October 1789     <span style="margin-left: 24.25em;">        <a href="#Page_23">23</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Alteration in Robespierre's position  <span style="margin-left: 21.25em;">        <a href="#Page_25">25</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Character of Louis XVI.   <span style="margin-left: 25.25em;">        <a href="#Page_28">28</a></span><br />
+<br />
+And of Marie Antoinette    <span style="margin-left: 25.25em;">        <a href="#Page_29">29</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The Constitution and Robespierre's mark upon it  <span style="margin-left: 16.25em;">     <a href="#Page_34">34</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Instability of the new arrangements <span style="margin-left: 21.5em;">      <a href="#Page_37">37</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Importance of Jacobin ascendancy  <span style="margin-left: 21.5em;">     <a href="#Page_41">41</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The Legislative Assembly  <span style="margin-left: 25em;">         <a href="#Page_42">42</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Robespierre's power at the Jacobin Club   <span style="margin-left: 19.25em;">         <a href="#Page_44">44</a></span><br />
+<br />
+His oratory  <span style="margin-left: 30.25em;">             <a href="#Page_45">45</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The true secret of his popularity  <span style="margin-left: 22.75em;">       <a href="#Page_48">48</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Aggravation of the crisis in the spring of 1792 <span style="margin-left: 17.5em;">     <a href="#Page_50">50</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The Tenth of August 1792  <span style="margin-left: 24.75em;">      <a href="#Page_52">52</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Danton  <span style="margin-left: 32em;">          <a href="#Page_53">53</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Compared with Robespierre<span style="margin-left: 24em;">      <a href="#Page_55">55</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Robespierre compared with Marat and with Siey&egrave;s  <span style="margin-left: 15.5em;"> <a href="#Page_57">57</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Character of the Terror <span style="margin-left: 26em;">       <a href="#Page_58">58</a></span><br />
+<br />
+</p>
+<h4><a href="#II">II.</a></h4>
+<p>
+Fall of the Girondins indispensable  <span style="margin-left: 22em;">       <a href="#Page_60">60</a></span><br />
+<br />
+France in desperate peril     <span style="margin-left: 25.5em;">      <a href="#Page_61">61</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The Committee of Public Safety    <span style="margin-left: 22.75em;">        <a href="#Page_65">65</a></span><br />
+<br />
+At the Tuileries  <span style="margin-left: 29em;">         <a href="#Page_67">67</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The contending factions    <span style="margin-left: 25.75em;">          <a href="#Page_70">70</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Reproduced an older conflict of theories<span style="margin-left: 19.5em;">    <a href="#Page_72">72</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Robespierre's attitude <span style="margin-left: 26.5em;">       <a href="#Page_73">73</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The H&eacute;bertists   <span style="margin-left: 29.25em;">       <a href="#Page_77">77</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Chaumette and his fundamental error   <span style="margin-left: 21em;">     <a href="#Page_80">80</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Robespierre and the atheists  <span style="margin-left: 24.25em;">     <a href="#Page_82">82</a></span><br />
+<br />
+His bitterness towards Anacharsis Clootz   <span style="margin-left: 19.5em;">      <a href="#Page_86">86</a></span><br />
+<br />
+New turn of events (March 1794) <span style="margin-left: 22.25em;">        <a href="#Page_90">90</a></span><br />
+<br />
+First breach in the Jacobin ranks: the H&eacute;bertists <span style="margin-left: 17.25em;"> <a href="#Page_90">90</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Robespierre's abandonment of Danton     <span style="margin-left: 20.5em;">     <a href="#Page_91">91</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Second breach: the Dantonians (April 1794)  <span style="margin-left: 18.25em;">    <a href="#Page_95">95</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Another reminiscence of this date  <span style="margin-left: 22.5em;">   <a href="#Page_97">97</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Robespierre's relations to the Committees changed  <span style="margin-left: 16em;">    <a href="#Page_98">98</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The Feast of the Supreme Being <span style="margin-left: 22.5em;">      <a href="#Page_101">101</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Its false philosophy   <span style="margin-left: 27.5em;">      <a href="#Page_103">103</a></span><br />
+<br />
+And political inanity  <span style="margin-left: 27.25em;">       <a href="#Page_104">104</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The Law of Prairial<span style="margin-left: 27.5em;">           <a href="#Page_106">106</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Robespierre's motive in devising it <span style="margin-left: 22em;">    <a href="#Page_107">107</a></span><br />
+<br />
+It produces the Great Terror   <span style="margin-left: 24em;">        <a href="#Page_109">109</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Robespierre's chagrin at its miscarriage <span style="margin-left: 20.25em;">   <a href="#Page_112">112</a></span><br />
+<br />
+His responsibility not to be denied   <span style="margin-left: 22em;">      <a href="#Page_112">112</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">(1) Affair of Catherine Th&eacute;ot</span><span style="margin-left: 23em;">  <a href="#Page_113">113</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 4em;">"&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;  C&eacute;cile Renault</span><span style="margin-left: 23.5em;"> <a href="#Page_114">114</a></span><br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">(2) Robespierre stimulated popular commissions</span><span style="margin-left: 15.75em;"> <a href="#Page_115">115</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The drama of Thermidor: the combatants  <span style="margin-left: 19.5em;">     <a href="#Page_117">117</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Its conditions   <span style="margin-left: 29.75em;">     <a href="#Page_118">118</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The Eighth Thermidor <span style="margin-left: 26.5em;">       <a href="#Page_119">119</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Inefficiency of Robespierre's speech  <span style="margin-left: 21.25em;">       <a href="#Page_121">121</a></span><br />
+<br />
+The Ninth Thermidor   <span style="margin-left: 27em;">         <a href="#Page_123">123</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Famous scene in the Convention <span style="margin-left: 22.75em;">             <a href="#Page_125">125</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Robespierre a prisoner <span style="margin-left: 26.25em;">          <a href="#Page_127">127</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Struggle between the Convention and the Commune <span style="margin-left: 15.25em;">     <a href="#Page_129">129</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Death of Robespierre    <span style="margin-left: 26.75em;">       <a href="#Page_131">131</a></span><br />
+<br />
+Ultimate issue of the struggle between the Committees<br />
+and the Convention  <span style="margin-left: 27.5em;">          <a href="#Page_132">132</a></span><br />
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>ROBESPIERRE.</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I.</h2>
+
+
+<p>A French writer has recently published a careful and interesting volume
+on the famous events which ended in the overthrow of Robespierre and the
+close of the Reign of Terror.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> These events are known in the historic
+calendar as the Revolution of Thermidor in the Year II. After the fall
+of the monarchy, the Convention decided that the year should begin with
+the autumnal equinox, and that the enumeration should date from the
+birth of the Republic. The Year I. opens on September 22, 1792; the Year
+II. opens on the same day of 1793. The month of Thermidor begins on July
+19. The memorable Ninth Thermidor therefore corresponds to July 27,
+1794. This has commonly been taken as the date of the commencement of a
+counter-revolution, and in one sense it was so. Comte, however, and
+others have preferred to fix the reaction at the execution of Danton
+(April 5, 1794), or Robespierre's official<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span> proclamation of Deism in the
+Festival of the Supreme Being (May 7, 1794).</p>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> <i>La R&eacute;volution de Thermidor</i>. Par Ch. D'H&eacute;ricault. Paris:
+Didier, 1876.</p></div>
+
+<p>M. D'H&eacute;ricault does not belong to the school of writers who treat the
+course of history as a great high road, following a firmly traced line,
+and set with plain and ineffaceable landmarks. The French Revolution has
+nearly always been handled in this way, alike by those who think it
+fruitful in blessings, and by their adversaries, who pronounce it a
+curse inflicted by the wrath of Heaven. Historians have looked at the
+Revolution as a plain landsman looks at the sea. To the landsman the
+ocean seems one huge immeasurable flood, obeying a simple law of ebb and
+flow, and offering to the navigator a single uniform force. Yet in truth
+we know that the oceanic movement is the product of many forces; the
+seeming uniformity covers the energy of a hundred currents and
+counter-currents; the sea-floor is not even nor the same, but is subject
+to untold conditions of elevation and subsidence; the sea is not one
+mass, but many masses moving along definite lines of their own. It is
+the same with the great tides of history. Wise men shrink from summing
+them up in single propositions. That the French Revolution led to an
+immense augmentation of happiness, both for the French and for mankind,
+can only be denied by the Pope. That it secured its beneficent results
+untempered by any mixture of evil, can only be maintained by men as mad
+as Doctor Pangloss. The Greek poetess Corinna said to the youthful
+Pindar, when he had interwoven all the gods<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span> and goddesses in the Theban
+mythology into a single hymn, that we should sow with the hand and not
+with the sack. Corinna's monition to the singer is proper to the
+interpreter of historical truth: he should cull with the hand, and not
+sweep in with the scythe. It is doubtless mere pedantry to abstain from
+the widest conception of the sum of a great movement. A clear, definite,
+and stable idea of the meaning in the history of human progress of such
+vast groups of events as the Reformation or the Revolution, is
+indispensable for any one to whom history is a serious study of society.
+It is just as important, however, not to forget that they were really
+groups of events, and not in either case a single uniform movement. The
+World-Epos is after all only a file of the morning paper in a state of
+glorification. A sensible man learns, in everyday life, to abstain from
+praising and blaming character by wholesale; he becomes content to say
+of this trait that it is good, and of that act that it was bad. So in
+history, we become unwilling to join or to admire those who insist upon
+transferring their sentiment upon the whole to their judgment upon each
+part. We seek to be allowed to retain a decided opinion as to the final
+value to mankind of a long series of transactions, and yet not to commit
+ourselves to set the same estimate on each transaction in particular,
+still less on each person associated with it. Why shall we not prize the
+general results of the Reformation, without being obliged to defend John
+of Leyden and the Munster Anabaptists?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>M. D'H&eacute;ricault's volume naturally suggests such reflections as these. Of
+all the men of the Revolution, Robespierre has suffered most from the
+audacious idolatry of some writers, and the splenetic impatience of
+others. M. Louis Blanc and M. Ernest Hamel talk of him as an angel or a
+prophet, and the Ninth Thermidor is a red day indeed in their
+martyrology. Michelet and M. D'H&eacute;ricault treat him as a mixture of
+Cagliostro and Caligula, both a charlatan and a miscreant. We are
+reminded of the commencement of an address of the French Senate to the
+first Bonaparte: 'Sire,' they began, 'the desire for perfection is one
+of the worst maladies that can afflict the human mind.' This bold
+aphorism touches one of the roots of the judgments we pass both upon men
+and events. It is because people so irrationally think fit to insist
+upon perfection, that Robespierre's admirers would fain deny that he
+ever had a fault, and the tacit adoption of the same impracticable
+standard makes it easier for Robespierre's wholesale detractors to deny
+that he had a single virtue or performed a single service. The point of
+view is essentially unfit for history. The real subject of history is
+the improvement of social arrangements, and no conspicuous actor in
+public affairs since the world began saw the true direction of
+improvement with an absolutely unerring eye from the beginning of his
+career to the end. It is folly for the historian, as it is for the
+statesman, to strain after the imaginative unity of the dramatic
+creator. Social progress is an affair of many small<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span> pieces and slow
+accretions, and the interest of historic study lies in tracing, amid the
+immense turmoil of events and through the confusion of voices, the
+devious course of the sacred torch, as it shifts from bearer to bearer.
+And it is not the bearers who are most interesting, but the torch.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>In the old Flemish town of Arras, known in the diplomatic history of the
+fifteenth century by a couple of important treaties, and famous in the
+industrial history of the Middle Ages for its pre-eminence in the
+manufacture of the most splendid kind of tapestry hangings, Maximilian
+Robespierre was born in May 1758. He was therefore no more than five and
+thirty years old when he came to his ghastly end in 1794. His father was
+a lawyer, and, though the surname of the family had the prefix of
+nobility, they belonged to the middle class. When this decorative prefix
+became dangerous, Maximilian Derobespierre dropped it. His great rival,
+Danton, was less prudent or less fortunate, and one of the charges made
+against him was that he had styled himself Monsieur D'Anton.</p>
+
+<p>Robespierre's youth was embittered by sharp misfortune. His mother died
+when he was only seven years old, and his father had so little courage
+under the blow that he threw up his practice, deserted his children, and
+died in purposeless wanderings through Germany. The burden that the weak
+and selfish throw down, must be taken up by the brave. Friendly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>
+kinsfolk charged themselves with the maintenance of the four orphans.
+Maximilian was sent to the school of the town, whence he proceeded with
+a sizarship to the college of Louis-le-Grand in Paris. He was an apt and
+studious pupil, but austere, and disposed to that sombre cast of spirits
+which is common enough where a lad of some sensibility and much
+self-esteem finds himself stamped with a badge of social inferiority.
+Robespierre's worshippers love to dwell on his fondness for birds: with
+the universal passion of mankind for legends of the saints, they tell
+how the untimely death of a favourite pigeon afflicted him with anguish
+so poignant, that, even sixty long years after, it made his sister's
+heart ache to look back upon the pain of that tragic moment. Always a
+sentimentalist, Robespierre was from boyhood a devout enthusiast for the
+great high priest of the sentimental tribe. Rousseau was then passing
+the last squalid days of his life among the meadows and woods at
+Ermenonville. Robespierre, who could not have been more than twenty at
+the time, for Rousseau died in the summer of 1778, is said to have gone
+on a reverential pilgrimage in search of an oracle from the lonely sage,
+as Boswell and as Gibbon and a hundred others had gone before him.
+Rousseau was wont to use his real adorers as ill as he used his
+imaginary enemies. Robespierre may well have shared the discouragement
+of the enthusiastic father who informed Rousseau that he was about to
+bring up his son on the principles of <i>Emilius</i>. 'Then so much the
+worse,' cried the per<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>verse philosopher, 'both for you and your son.' If
+he had been endowed with second sight, he would have thought at least as
+rude a presage due to this last and most ill-starred of a whole
+generation of neophytes.</p>
+
+<p>In 1781 Robespierre returned to Arras, and amid the welcome of his
+relatives and the good hopes of friends began the practice of an
+advocate. For eight years he led an active and seemly life. He was not
+wholly pure from that indiscretion of the young appetite, about which
+the world is mute, but whose better ordering and governance would give a
+diviner brightness to the earth. Still, if he did not escape the ordeal
+of youth, Robespierre was frugal, laborious, and persevering. His
+domestic amiability made him the delight of his sister, and his zealous
+self-sacrifice for the education and advancement in life of his younger
+brother was afterwards repaid by Augustin Robespierre's devotion through
+all the fierce and horrible hours of Thermidor. Though cold in
+temperament, extremely reserved in manners, and fond of industrious
+seclusion, Robespierre did not disdain the social diversions of the
+town. He was a member of a reunion of Rosati, who sang madrigals and
+admired one another's bad verses. Those who love the ironical surprises
+of fate, may picture the young man who was doomed to play so terrible a
+part in terrible affairs, going through the harmless follies of a
+ceremonial reception by the Rosati, taking three deep breaths over a
+rose, solemnly fastening the emblem to his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span> coat, emptying a glass of
+rose-red wine at a draught to the good health of the company, and
+finally reciting couplets that Voltaire would have found almost as
+detestable as the Law of Prairial or the Festival of the Supreme Being.
+More laudable efforts of ambition were prize essays, in which
+Robespierre has the merit of taking the right side in important
+questions. He protested against the inhumanity of laws that inflicted
+civil infamy upon the innocent family of a convicted criminal. And he
+protested against the still more horrid cruelty which reduced
+unfortunate children born out of wedlock to something like the status of
+the medi&aelig;val serf. Robespierre's compositions at this time do not rise
+above the ordinary level of declaiming mediocrity, but they promised a
+manhood of benignity and enlightenment. To compose prize essays on
+political reforms was better than to ignore or to oppose political
+reform. But the course of events afterwards owed their least desirable
+bias to the fact that such compositions were the nearest approach to
+political training that so many of the revolutionary leaders underwent.
+One is inclined to apply to practical politics Arthur Young's sensible
+remark about the endeavour of the French to improve the quality of their
+wool: 'A cultivator at the head of a sheep-farm of 3000 or 4000 acres,
+would in a few years do more for their wools than all the academicians
+and philosophers will effect in ten centuries.'</p>
+
+<p>In his profession he distinguished himself in one or two causes of local
+celebrity. An innovating<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span> citizen had been ordered by the authorities to
+remove a lightning-conductor from his house within three days, as being
+a mischievous practical paradox, as well as a danger and an annoyance to
+his neighbours. Robespierre pleaded the innovator's case on appeal, and
+won it. He defended a poor woman who had been wrongfully accused by a
+monk belonging to the powerful corporation of a great neighbouring
+abbey. The young advocate did not even shrink from manfully arguing a
+case against the august Bishop of Arras himself. His independence did
+him no harm. The Bishop afterwards appointed him to the post of judge or
+legal assessor in the episcopal court. This tribunal was a remnant of
+what had once been the sovereign authority and jurisdiction of the
+Bishops of Arras. That a court with the power of life and death should
+thus exist by the side of a proper corporation of civil magistrates, is
+an illustration of the inextricable labyrinth of the French law and its
+administration on the eve of the Revolution. Robespierre did not hold
+his office long. Every one has heard the striking story, how the young
+judge, whose name was within half a dozen years to take a place in the
+popular mind of France and of Europe with the bloodiest monsters of myth
+or history, resigned his post in a fit of remorse after condemning a
+murderer to be executed. 'He is a criminal, no doubt,' Robespierre kept
+groaning in reply to the consolations of his sister, for women are more
+positive creatures than men: 'a criminal, no doubt; but to put a man to
+death!' Many a man<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> thus begins the great voyage with queasy
+sensibilities, and ends it a cannibal.</p>
+
+<p>Among Robespierre's associates in the festive mummeries of the Rosati
+was a young officer of Engineers, who was destined to be his colleague
+in the dread Committee of Public Safety, and to leave an important name
+in French history. In the garrison of Arras, Carnot was quartered,&mdash;that
+iron head, whose genius for the administrative organisation of war
+achieved even greater things for the new republic than the genius of
+Louvois had achieved for the old monarchy. Carnot surpassed not only
+Louvois, but perhaps all other names save one in modern military
+history, by uniting to the most powerful gifts for organisation, both
+the strategic talent that planned the momentous campaign of 1794, and
+the splendid personal energy and skill that prolonged the defence of
+Antwerp against the allied army in 1814 Partisans dream of the
+unrivalled future of peace, glory, and freedom that would have fallen to
+the lot of France, if only the gods had brought about a hearty union
+between the military genius of Carnot and the political genius of
+Robespierre. So, no doubt, after the restoration of Charles II. in
+England, there were good men who thought that all would have gone very
+differently, if only the genius of the great creator of the Ironsides
+had taken counsel with the genius of Venner, the Fifth-Monarchy Man, and
+Feak, the Anabaptist prophet.</p>
+
+<p>The time was now come when such men as Robespierre were to be tried with
+fire, when they were to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> drink the cup of fury and the dregs of the cup
+of trembling. Sybils and prophets have already spoken their inexorable
+decree, as Goethe has said, on the day that first gives the man to the
+world; no time and no might can break the stamped mould of his
+character; only as life wears on, do all its aforeshapen lines come into
+light. He is launched into a sea of external conditions, that are as
+independent of his own will as the temperament with which he confronts
+them. It is action that tries, and variation of circumstance. The leaden
+chains of use bind many an ugly unsuspected prisoner in the soul; and
+when the habit of their lives has been sundered, the most immaculate are
+capable of antics beyond prevision. A great crisis of the world was
+prepared for Robespierre and those others, his allies or his destroyers,
+who with him came like the lightning and went like the wind.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of 1788 the King of France found himself forced to summon the
+States-General. It was their first assembly since 1614. On the memorable
+Fourth of May, 1789, Robespierre appeared at Versailles as one of the
+representatives of the third estate of his native province of Artois.
+The excitement and enthusiasm of the elections to this renowned
+assembly, the immense demands and boundless expectations that they
+disclosed, would have warned a cool observer of events, if in that
+heated air a cool observer could have been found, that the hour had
+struck for the fulfilment of those grim apprehensions of revolution that
+had risen in the minds of many<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> shrewd men, good and bad, in the course
+of the previous half century. No great event in history ever comes
+wholly unforeseen. The antecedent causes are so wide-reaching, many, and
+continuous, that their direction is always sure to strike the eye of one
+or more observers in all its significance. Lewis the Fifteenth, whose
+invincible weariness and heavy disgust veiled a penetrating discernment,
+measured accurately the scope of the conflict between the crown and the
+parlements: but, said he, things as they are will last my time. Under
+the roof of his own palace at Versailles, in the apartment of Madame de
+Pompadour's famous physician, one of Quesnai's economic disciples had
+cried out, 'The realm is in a sore way; it will never be cured without a
+great internal commotion; but woe to those who have to do with it; into
+such work the French go with no slack hand.' Rousseau, in a passage in
+the Confessions, not only divines a speedy convulsion, but with striking
+practical sagacity enumerates the political and social causes that were
+unavoidably drawing France to the edge of the abyss. Lord Chesterfield,
+so different a man from Rousseau, declared as early as 1752, that he saw
+in France every symptom that history had taught him to regard as the
+forerunner of deep change; before the end of the century, so his
+prediction ran, both the trade of king and the trade of priest in France
+would be shorn of half their glory. D'Argenson in the same year declared
+a revolution inevitable, and with a curious precision of anticipation
+assured himself that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> if once the necessity arose of convoking the
+States-General, they would not assemble in vain: <i>qu'on y prenne, garde!
+ils seraient fort s&eacute;rieux!</i> Oliver Goldsmith, idly wandering through
+France, towards 1755, discerned in the mutinous attitude of the judicial
+corporations, that the genius of freedom was entering the kingdom in
+disguise, and that a succession of three weak monarchs would end in the
+emancipation of the people of France. The most touching of all these
+presentiments is to be found in a private letter of the great Empress,
+the mother of Marie Antoinette herself. Maria Theresa describes the
+ruined state of the French monarchy, and only prays that if it be doomed
+to ruin still more utter, at least the blame may not fall upon her
+daughter. The Empress had not learnt that when the giants of social
+force are advancing from the sombre shadow of the past, with the thunder
+and the hurricane in their hands, our poor prayers are of no more avail
+than the unbodied visions of a dream.</p>
+
+<p>The old popular assembly of the realm was not resorted to before every
+means of dispensing with so drastic a remedy had been tried. Historians
+sometimes write as if Turgot were the only able and reforming minister
+of the century. God forbid that we should put any other minister on a
+level with that high and beneficent figure. But Turgot was not the first
+statesman, both able and patriotic, who had been disgraced for want of
+compliance with the conditions of success at court; he was only the last
+of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> series. Chauvelin, a man of vigour and capacity, was dismissed
+with ignominy in 1736. Machault, a reformer, at once courageous and
+wise, shared the same fate twenty years later; and in his case
+revolution was as cruel and as heedless as reaction, for, at the age of
+ninety-one, the old man was dragged, blind and deaf, before the
+revolutionary tribunal and thence despatched to the guillotine. Between
+Chauvelin and Machault, the elder D'Argenson, who was greater than
+either of them, had been raised to power, and then speedily hurled down
+from it (1747), for no better reason than that his manners were uncouth,
+and that he would not waste his time in frivolities that were as the
+breath of life in the great gallery at Versailles and on the
+smooth-shaven lawns of Fontainebleau.</p>
+
+<p>Not only had wise counsellors been tried; consultative assemblies had
+been tried also. Necker had been dismissed in 1781, after publishing the
+memorable Report which first initiated the nation in the elements of
+financial knowledge. The disorder waxed greater, and the monarchy drew
+nearer to bankruptcy each year. The only modern parallel to the state of
+things in France under Lewis the Sixteenth is to be sought in the state
+of things in Egypt or in Turkey. Lewis the Fourteenth had left a debt of
+between two and three thousand millions of livres, but this had been
+wiped out by the heroic operations of Law; operations, by the way, which
+have never yet been scientifically criticised. But the debt soon grew<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>
+again, by foolish wars, by the prodigality of the court, and by the
+rapacity of the nobles. It amounted in 1789 to something like two
+hundred and forty millions sterling; and it is interesting to notice
+that this was exactly the sum of the public debt of Great Britain at the
+same time. The year's excess of expenditure over receipts in 1774 was
+about fifty millions of livres: in 1787 it was one hundred and forty
+millions, or according to a different computation even two hundred
+millions. The material case was not at all desperate, if only the court
+had been less infatuated, and the spirit of the privileged orders had
+been less blind and less vile. The fatality of the situation lay in the
+characters of a handful of men and women. For France was abundant in
+resources, and even at this moment was far from unprosperous, in spite
+of the incredible trammels of law and custom. An able financier, with
+the support of a popular chamber and the assent of the sovereign, could
+have had no difficulty in restoring the public credit. But the
+conditions, simple as they might seem to a patriot or to posterity, were
+unattainable so long as power remained with a caste that were anything
+we please except patriots. An Assembly of Notables was brought together,
+but it was only the empty phantasm of national representation. Yet the
+situation was so serious that even this body, of arbitrary origin as it
+was, still was willing to accept vital reforms. The privileged order,
+who were then as their descendants are now, the worst conservative party
+in Europe,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span> immediately persuaded the magisterial corporation to resist
+the Notables. The judicial corporation or Parlement of Paris had been
+suppressed under Lewis the Fifteenth, and unfortunately revived again at
+the accession of his grandson. By the inconvenient constitution of the
+French government, the assent of that body was indispensable to fiscal
+legislation, on the ground that such legislation was part of the general
+police of the realm. The king's minister, now Lom&eacute;nie de Brienne,
+devised a new judicial constitution. But the churchmen, the nobles, and
+the lawyers all united in protestations against such a blow. The common
+people are not always the best judges of a remedy for the evils under
+which they are the greatest sufferers, and they broke out in disorder
+both in Paris and the provinces. They discerned an attack upon their
+local independence. Nobody would accept office in the new courts, and
+the administration of justice was at a standstill. A loan was thrown
+upon the market, but the public could not be persuaded to take it up. It
+was impossible to collect the taxes. The interest on the national debt
+was unpaid, and the fundholder was dismayed and exasperated by an
+announcement that only two-fifths would be discharged in cash. A very
+large part of the national debt was held in the form of annuities for
+lives, and men who had invested their savings on the credit of the
+government, saw themselves left without a provision. The total number of
+fundholders cannot be ascertained with any precision, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span> it must have
+been very considerable, especially in Paris and the other great cities.
+Add to these all the civil litigants in the kingdom, who had portions of
+their property virtually sequestrated by the suspension of the courts
+into which the property had been taken. The resentment of this immense
+body of defrauded public creditors and injured private suitors explains
+the alienation of the middle class from the monarchy. In the convulsions
+of our own time, the moneyed interests have been on one side, and the
+population without money on the other. But in the first and greatest
+convulsion, those who had nothing to lose found their animosities shared
+by those who had had something to lose, and had lost it.</p>
+
+<p>Deliberative assemblies, then, had been tried, and ministers had been
+tried; both had failed, and there was no other device left, except one
+which was destructive to absolute monarchy. Lewis the Sixteenth was in
+1789 in much the same case as that of the King of England in 1640.
+Charles had done his best to raise money without any parliament for
+twelve years: he had lost patience with the Short Parliament; finally,
+he was driven without choice or alternative to face as he best could the
+stout resolution and the wise patriotism of the Long Parliament. Men
+sometimes wonder how it was that Lewis, when he came to find the
+National Assembly unmanageable, and discovering how rapidly he was
+drifting towards the thunders of the revolutionary cataract, did not
+break up a Chamber over which neither the court,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> nor even a minister so
+popular as Necker, had the least control. It is a question whether the
+sword would not have broken in his hand. Even supposing, however, that
+the army would have consented to a violent movement against the
+Assembly, the King would still have been left in the same desperate
+straits from which he had looked to the States-General to extricate him.
+He might perhaps have dispersed the Assembly; he could not disperse debt
+and deficit. Those monsters would have haunted him as implacably as
+ever. There was no new formula of exorcism, nor any untried enchantment.
+The success of violent designs against the National Assembly, had
+success been possible, could, after all, have been followed by no other
+consummation than the relapse of France into the raging anarchy of
+Poland, or the sullen decrepitude of Turkey.</p>
+
+<p>This will seem to some persons no better than fatalism. But, in truth,
+there are two popular ways of reading the history of events between 1789
+and 1794, and each of them seems to us as bad as the other. According to
+one, whatever happened in the Revolution was good and admirable, because
+it happened. According to the other, something good and admirable was
+always attainable, and, if only bad men had not interposed, always ready
+to happen. Of course, the only sensible view is that many of the
+revolutionary solutions were detestable, but no other solution was
+within reach. This is undoubtedly the best of possible worlds; if the
+best is not so good as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span> we could wish, that is the fault of the
+possibilities. Such a doctrine is neither fatalism nor optimism, but an
+honest recognition of long chains of cause and effect in human affairs.</p>
+
+<p>The great gathering of chosen men was first called States-General; then
+it called itself National Assembly; it is commonly known in history as
+the Constituent Assembly. The name is of ironical association, for the
+constitution which it framed after much travail endured for no more than
+a few months. Its deliberations lasted from May 1789 until September
+1791. Among its members were three principal groups. There was, first, a
+band of blind adherents of the old system of government with all or most
+of its abuses. Second, there was a Centre of timid and one-eyed men, who
+were for transforming the old absolutist system into something that
+should resemble the constitution of our own country. Finally, there was
+a Left, with some differences of shade, but all agreeing in the
+necessity of a thorough remodelling of every institution and most of the
+usages of the country. 'Silence, you thirty votes!' cried Mirabeau one
+day, when he was interrupted by the dissents of the Mountain. This was
+the original measure of the party that in the twinkling of an eye was to
+wield the destinies of France. In our own time we have wondered at the
+rapidity with which a Chamber that was one day on the point of bringing
+back the grandnephew of Lewis the Sixteenth, found itself a little later
+voting that Republic which has since been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> ratified by the nation, and
+has at this moment the ardent good wishes of every enlightened
+politician in Europe. In the same way it is startling to think that
+within three years of the beheading of Lewis the Sixteenth, there was
+probably not one serious republican in the representative assembly of
+France. Yet it is always so. We might make just the same remark of the
+House of Commons at Westminster in 1640, and of the Assembly of
+Massachusetts or of New York as late as 1770. The final flash of a long
+unconscious train of thought or intent is ever a surprise and a shock.
+It is a mistake to set these swift changes down to political levity;
+they were due rather to quickness of political intuition. It was the
+King's attempt at flight in the summer of 1791 that first created a
+republican party. It was that unhappy exploit, and no theoretical
+preferences, that awoke France to the necessity of choosing between the
+sacrifice of monarchy and the restoration of territorial aristocracy.</p>
+
+<p>Political intuition was never one of Robespierre's conspicuous gifts.
+But he had a doctrine that for a certain time served the same purpose.
+Rousseau had kindled in him a fervid democratic enthusiasm, and had
+penetrated his mind with the principle of the Sovereignty of the People.
+This famous dogma contained implicitly within it the more indisputable
+truth that a society ought to be regulated with a view to the happiness
+of the people. Such a principle made it easier for Robespierre to
+interpret rightly the first<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> phases of the revolutionary movement. It
+helped him to discern that the concentrated physical force of the
+populace was the only sure protection against a civil war. And if a
+civil war had broken out in 1789, instead of 1793, all the advantages of
+authority would have been against the popular party. The first
+insurrection of Paris is associated with the harangue of Camille
+Desmoulins at the Palais Royal, with the fall of the Bastille, with the
+murder of the governor, and a hundred other scenes of melodramatic
+horror and the blood-red picturesque. The insurrection of the Fourteenth
+of July 1789 taught Robespierre a lesson of practical politics, which
+exactly fitted in with his previous theories. In his resentment against
+the oppressive disorder of monarchy and feudalism, he had accepted the
+counter principle that the people can do no wrong, and nobody of sense
+now doubts that in their first great act the people of Paris did what
+was right. Six days after the fall of the Bastille, the Centre were for
+issuing a proclamation denouncing popular violence and ordering rigorous
+vigilance. Robespierre was then so little known in the Assembly that
+even his name was usually misspelt in the journals. From his obscure
+bench on the Mountain he cried out with bitter vehemence against the
+proposed proclamation:&mdash;'Revolt! But this revolt is liberty. The battle
+is not at its end. Tomorrow, it may be, the shameful designs against us
+will be renewed; and who will there then be to repulse them, if
+beforehand we declare the very men<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> to be rebels, who have rushed to
+arms for our protection and safety?' This was the cardinal truth of the
+situation. Everybody knows Mirabeau's saying about Robespierre:&mdash;'That
+man will go far: he believes every word that he says!' This is much, but
+it is only half. It is not only that the man of power believes what he
+says; what he believes must fit in with the facts and with the demands
+of the time. Now Robespierre's firmness of conviction happened at this
+stage to be rightly matched by his clearness of sight.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that a passionate mob, its unearthly admixture of laughter
+with fury, of vacancy with deadly concentration, is as terrible as some
+uncouth antediluvian, or the unfamiliar monsters of the sea, or one of
+the giant plants that make men shudder with mysterious fear. The history
+of our own country in the eighteenth century tells of the riots against
+meeting-houses in Doctor Sacheverell's time, and the riots against
+papists and their abettors in Lord George Gordon's time, and
+Church-and-King riots in Doctor Priestley's time. It would be too
+daring, therefore, to maintain that the rabble of the poor have any more
+unerring political judgment than the rabble of the opulent. But, in
+France in 1789, Robespierre was justified in saying that revolt meant
+liberty. If there had been no revolt in July, the court party would have
+had time to mature their infatuated designs of violence against the
+Assembly. In October these designs had come to life again. The royalists
+at Versailles had exultant banquets, at which, in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> presence of the
+Queen, they drank confusion to all patriots, and trampled the new emblem
+of freedom passionately underfoot. The news of this odious folly soon
+travelled to Paris. Its significance was speedily understood by a
+populace whose wits were sharpened by famine. Thousands of fire-eyed
+women and men tramped intrepidly out towards Versailles. If they had
+done less, the Assembly would have been dispersed or arbitrarily
+decimated, even though such a measure would certainly have left the
+government in desperation.</p>
+
+<p>At that dreadful moment of the Sixth of October, amid the slaughter of
+guards and the frantic yells of hatred against the Queen, it is no
+wonder that some were found to urge the King to flee to Metz. If he had
+accepted the advice, the course of the Revolution would have been
+different; but its march would have been just as irresistible, for
+revolution lay in the force of a hundred combined circumstances. Lewis,
+however, rejected these counsels, and suffered the mob to carry him in
+bewildering procession to his capital and his prison. That great man who
+was watching French affairs with such consuming eagerness from distant
+Beaconsfield in our English Buckinghamshire, instantly divined that this
+procession from Versailles to the Tuileries marked the fall of the
+monarchy. 'A revolution in sentiment, manners, and moral opinions, the
+most important of all revolutions in a word,' was in Burke's judgment to
+be dated from the Sixth of October 1789.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The events of that day did, indeed, give its definite cast to the
+situation. The moral authority of the sovereign came to an end, along
+with the ancient and reverend mystery of the inviolability of his
+person. The Count d'Artois, the King's second brother, one of the most
+worthless of human beings, as incurably addicted to sinister and
+suicidal counsels in 1789 as he was when he overthrew his own throne
+forty years later, had run away from peril and from duty after the
+insurrection of July. After the insurrection of October, a troop of the
+nobles of the court followed him. The personal cowardice of the
+Emigrants was only matched by their political blindness. Many of the
+most unwise measures in the Assembly were only passed by small
+majorities, and the majorities would have been transformed into
+minorities, if in the early days of the Revolution these unworthy men
+had only stood firm at their posts. Selfish oligarchies have scarcely
+ever been wanting in courage. The emigrant noblesse of France are almost
+the only instance of a great privileged and territorial caste that had
+as little bravery as they had patriotism. The explanation is that they
+had been an oligarchy, not of power or duty, but of self-indulgence.
+They were crushed by Richelieu to secure the unity of the monarchy. They
+now effaced themselves at the Revolution, and this secured that far
+greater object, the unity of the nation.</p>
+
+<p>The disappearance of so many of the nobles from France was not the only
+abdication on the part of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span> the conservative powers. Cowed and terrified
+by the events of October, no less than three hundred members of the
+Assembly sought to resign. The average attendance even at the most
+important sittings was often incredibly small. Thus the Chamber came to
+have little more moral authority in face of the people of Paris than had
+the King himself. The people of Paris had themselves become in a day the
+masters of France.</p>
+
+<p>This immense change led gradually to a decisive alteration in the
+position of Robespierre. He found the situation of affairs at last
+falling into perfect harmony with his doctrine. Rousseau had taught him
+that the people ought to be sovereign, and now the people were being
+recognised as sovereign <i>de facto</i> no less than <i>de jure</i>. Any
+limitations on the new divine right united the horror of blasphemy to
+the secular wickedness of political treason. After the Assembly had come
+to Paris, a famishing mob in a moment of mad fury murdered an
+unfortunate baker, who was suspected of keeping back bread. These
+paroxysms led to the enactment of a new martial law. Robespierre spoke
+vehemently against it; such a law implied a wrongful distrust of the
+people. Then discussions followed as to the property qualification of an
+elector. Citizens were classed as active and passive. Only those were to
+have votes who paid direct taxes to the amount of three days' wages in
+the year. Robespierre flung himself upon this too famous distinction
+with bitter tenacity. If all men<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> are equal, he cried, then all men
+ought to have votes: if he who only pays the amount of one day's work,
+has fewer rights than another who pays the amount of three days, why
+should not the man who pays ten days have more rights than the other who
+only pays the earnings of three days? This kind of reasoning had little
+weight with the Chamber, but it made the reasoner very popular with the
+throng in the galleries. Even within the Assembly, influence gradually
+came to the man who had a parcel of immutable axioms and postulates, and
+who was ready with a deduction and a phrase for each case as it arose.
+He began to stand out like a needle of sharp rock, amid the flitting
+shadows of uncertain purpose and the vapoury drift of wandering aims.</p>
+
+<p>Robespierre had no social conception, and he had nothing which can be
+described as a policy. He was the prophet of a sect, and had at this
+period none of the aims of the chief of a political party. What he had
+was democratic doctrine, and an intrepid logic. And Robespierre's
+intrepid logic was the nearest approach to calm force and coherent
+character that the first three years of the Revolution brought into
+prominence. When the Assembly met, Necker was the popular idol. Almost
+within a few weeks, this well-meaning, but very incompetent divinity had
+slipped from his throne, and Lafayette had taken his place. Mirabeau
+came next. The ardent and animated genius of his eloquence fitted him
+above all men to ride the whirlwind and direct the storm.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> And on the
+memorable Twenty-third of June '89, he had shown the genuine audacity
+and resource of a revolutionary statesman, when he stirred the Chamber
+to defy the King's demand, and hailed the royal usher with the
+resounding words:&mdash;'You, sir, have neither place nor right of speech. Go
+tell those who sent you that we are here by the will of the people, and
+only bayonets shall drive us hence!' But Mirabeau bore a tainted
+character, and was always distrusted. 'Ah, how the immorality of my
+youth,' he used to say, in words that sum up the tragedy of many a
+puissant life, 'how the immorality of my youth hinders the public good!'
+The event proved that the popular suspicion was just: the patriot is now
+no longer merely suspected, but known, to have sullied his hands with
+the money of the court. He did not sell himself, it has been said; he
+allowed himself to be paid. The distinction was too subtle for men doing
+battle for their lives and for freedom, and Mirabeau's popularity waned
+towards the middle of 1790. The next favourite was Barnave, the generous
+and high-minded spokesman of those sanguine spirits who to the very end
+hoped against hope to save both the throne and its occupant. By the
+spring of 1791 Barnave followed his predecessors into disfavour. The
+Assembly was engaged on the burning question of the government of the
+colonies. Were the negro slaves to be admitted to citizenship, or was a
+legislature of planters to be entrusted with the task of social
+reformation? Our own generation has seen in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> the republic of the West
+what strife this political difficulty is capable of raising. Barnave
+pronounced against the negroes. Robespierre, on the contrary, declaimed
+against any limitation of the right of the negro, as a compromise with
+the avarice, pride, and cruelty of a governing race, and a guilty
+trafficking with the rights of man. Barnave from that day saw that his
+laurel crown had gone to Robespierre.</p>
+
+<p>If the people 'called him noble that was now their hate, him vile that
+was their garland,' they did not transfer their affections without sound
+reason. Barnave's sensibility was too easily touched. There are many
+politicians in every epoch whose principles grow slack and flaccid at
+the approach of the golden sun of royalty. Barnave was one of those who
+was sent to bring back the fugitive King and Queen from Varennes, and
+the journey by their side in the coach unstrung his spirit. He became
+one of the court's clandestine advisers. Men of this weak susceptibility
+of imagination are not fit for times of revolution. To be on the side of
+the court was to betray the cause of the nation. We cannot take too much
+pains to realise that the voluntary conversion of Lewis the Sixteenth to
+a popular constitution and the abolition of feudalism, was practically
+as impossible as the conversion of Pope Pius the Ninth to the doctrine
+of a free church in a free state. Those who believe in the miracle of
+free will may think of this as they please. Sensible people who accept
+the scientific account of human character, know that the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span> sudden
+transformation of a man or a woman brought up to middle age as the heir
+to centuries of absolutist tradition, into adherents of a government
+that agreed with the doctrines of Locke and Milton, was only possible on
+condition of supernatural interference. The King's good nature was no
+substitute for political capacity or insight. An instructive measure of
+the degree in which he possessed these two qualities may be found in
+that deplorable diary of his, where on such days as the Fourteenth of
+July, when the Bastille fell, and the Sixth of October, when he was
+carried in triumph from Versailles to the Tuileries, he made the simple
+entry, '<i>Rien</i>.' And he had no firmness. It was as difficult to keep the
+King to a purpose, La Marck said to Mirabeau, as to keep together a
+number of well-oiled ivory balls. Lewis, moreover, was guided by a more
+energetic and less compliant character than his own.</p>
+
+<p>Marie Antoinette's high mien in adversity, and the contrast between the
+dazzling splendour of her first years and the scenes of outrage and
+bloody death that made the climax of her fate, could not but strike the
+imaginations of men. Such contrasts are the very stuff of which Tragedy,
+the gorgeous muse with scepter'd pall, loves to weave her most imposing
+raiment. But history must be just; and the character of the Queen had
+far more concern in the disaster of the first five years of the
+Revolution than had the character of Robespierre. Every new document
+that comes to light heaps up proof that if<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span> blind and obstinate choice
+of personal gratification before the common weal be enough to constitute
+a state criminal, then the Queen of France was one of the worst state
+criminals that ever afflicted a nation. The popular hatred of Marie
+Antoinette sprang from a sound instinct. We shall never know how much or
+how little truth there was in those frightful charges against her, that
+may still be read in a thousand pamphlets. These imputed depravities far
+surpass anything that John Knox ever said against Mary Stuart, or that
+Juvenal has recorded against Messalina; and, perhaps, for the only
+parallel we must look to the hideous stories of the Byzantine secretary
+against Theodora, the too famous empress of Justinian and the persecutor
+of Belisarius. We have to remember that all the revolutionary portraits
+are distorted by furious passion, and that Marie Antoinette may no more
+deserve to be compared to Mary Stuart than Robespierre deserves to be
+compared to Ezzelino or to Alva. The aristocrats were the libellers, if
+libels they were. It is at least certain that, from the unlucky hour
+when the Austrian archduchess crossed the French frontier, a childish
+bride of fourteen, down to the hour when the Queen of France made the
+attempt to recross it in resentful flight one and twenty years
+afterwards, Marie Antoinette was ignorant, unteachable, blind to events
+and deaf to good counsels, a bitter grief to her heroic mother, the evil
+genius of her husband, the despair of her truest advisers, and an
+exceedingly bad friend<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> to the people of France. When Burke had that
+immortal vision of her at Versailles&mdash;'just above the horizon,
+decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,
+glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendour and
+joy'&mdash;we know from the correspondence between Maria Theresa and her
+minister at Versailles, that what Burke really saw was no divinity, but
+a flighty and troublesome schoolgirl, an accomplice in all the ignoble
+intrigues, and a sharer of all the small busy passions, that convulse
+the insects of a court. The levity that came with her Lorraine blood,
+broke out in incredible dissipations; in indiscreet visits to the masked
+balls at the opera, in midnight parades and mystifications on the
+terrace at Versailles, in insensate gambling. 'The court of France is
+turned into a gaming-hell,' said the Emperor Joseph, the Queen's own
+brother: 'if they do not amend, the revolution will be cruel.' These
+vices or follies were less mischievous than her intervention in affairs
+of state. Here her levity was as marked as in the paltry affairs of the
+boudoir and the ante-chamber, and here to levity she added both
+dissimulation and vindictiveness. It was the Queen's influence that
+procured the dismissal of the two virtuous ministers by whose aid the
+King was striving to arrest the decay of the government of his kingdom.
+Malesherbes was distasteful to her for no better reason than that she
+wanted his post for some favourite's favourite. Against Turgot she
+conspired with tenacious animosity, because he had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> suppressed a
+sinecure which she designed for a court parasite, and because he would
+not support her caprice on behalf of a worthless creature of her
+faction. These two admirable men were disgraced on the same day. The
+Queen wrote to her mother that she had not meddled in the affair. This
+was a falsehood, for she had even sought to have Turgot thrown into the
+Bastille. 'I am as one dashed to the ground,' cried the great Voltaire,
+now nearing his end. 'Never can we console ourselves for having seen the
+golden age dawn and vanish. My eyes see only death in front of me, now
+that Turgot is gone. The rest of my days must be all bitterness.' What
+hope could there be that the personage who had thus put out the light of
+hope for France in 1776, would welcome that greater flame which was
+kindled in the land in 1789?</p>
+
+<p>When people write hymns of pity for the Queen, we always recall the poor
+woman whom Arthur Young met, as he was walking up a hill to ease his
+horse near Mars-le-Tour. Though the unfortunate creature was only
+twenty-eight, she might have been taken for sixty or seventy, her figure
+was so bent, her face so furrowed and hardened by toil. Her husband, she
+said, had a morsel of land, one cow, and a poor little horse, yet he had
+to pay forty-two pounds of wheat and three chickens to one Seigneur, and
+one hundred and sixty pounds of oats, one chicken, and one franc to
+another, besides very heavy tailles and other taxes; and they had seven
+children. She had heard that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> 'something was to be done by some great
+folks for such poor ones, but she did not know who nor how, but God send
+us better, for the tailles and the dues grind us to the earth.' It was
+such hapless drudges as this who replenished the Queen's gaming tables
+at Versailles. Thousands of them dragged on the burden of their harassed
+and desperate days, less like men and women than beasts of the field
+wrung and tortured and mercilessly overladen, in order that the Queen
+might gratify her childish passion for diamonds, or lavish money and
+estates on worthless female Polignacs and Lamballes, or kill time at a
+cost of five hundred louis a night at lansquenet and the faro bank. The
+Queen, it is true, was in all this no worse than other dissipated women
+then and since. She did not realise that it was the system to which she
+had stubbornly committed herself, that drove the people of the fields to
+cut their crops green to be baked in the oven, because their hunger
+could not wait; or made them cower whole days in their beds, because
+misery seemed to gnaw them there with a duller fang. That she was
+unconscious of its effect, makes no difference in the real drift of her
+policy; makes no difference in the judgment that we ought to pass upon
+it, nor in the gratitude that is owed to the stern men who rose up to
+consume her and her court with righteous flame. The Queen and the
+courtiers, and the hard-faring woman of Mars-le-Tour, and that whole
+generation, have long been dust and shadow; they have vanished from the
+earth, as if<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> they were no more than the fire-flies that the peasant of
+the Italian poet saw dancing in the vineyard, as he took his evening
+rest on the hillside. They have all fled back into the impenetrable
+shade whence they came; our minds are free; and if social equity is not
+a chimera, Marie Antoinette was the protagonist of the most barbarous
+and execrable of causes.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Let us return to the shaping of the Constitution, not forgetting that
+its stability was to depend upon the Queen. Robespierre left some
+characteristic marks on the final arrangements. He imposed upon the
+Assembly a motion prohibiting any member of it from accepting office
+under the Crown for a period of four years after the dissolution.
+Robespierre from this time forth constantly illustrated a very singular
+truth; namely, that the most ostentatious faith in humanity in general
+seems always to beget the sharpest distrust of all human beings in
+particular. He proceeded further in the same direction. It was
+Robespierre who persuaded the Chamber to pass a self-denying ordinance.
+All its members were declared ineligible for a seat in the legislature
+that was to replace them. The members of the Right on this occasion went
+with their bitter foes of the Extreme Left, and to both parties have
+been imputed sinister and Machiavellian motives. The Right, aware that
+their own return to the new Assembly was impossible, were delighted to
+reduce the men with whom they had been carrying on incensed battle for
+two long<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> years, to their own obscurity and impotence. Robespierre, on
+the other hand, is accused of a jealous desire to exclude Barnave from
+power. He is accused also of a deliberate intention to weaken the new
+legislature, in order to secure the preponderance of the Parisian clubs.
+There is no evidence that these malignant feelings were in Robespierre's
+mind. The reasons he gave were exactly of the kind that we should have
+expected to weigh with a man of his stamp. There is even a certain truth
+in them, that is not inconsistent with the experience of a parliamentary
+country like our own. To talk, he said, of the transmission of light and
+experience from one assembly to another, was to distrust the public
+spirit. The influence of opinion and the general good grows less, as the
+influence of parliamentary orators grows greater. He had no taste, he
+proceeded with one of his chilly sneers, for that new science which was
+styled the tactics of great assemblies; it was too like intrigue.
+Nothing but truth and reason ought to reign in a legislature. He did not
+like the idea of clever men becoming dominant by skilful tactics, and
+then perpetuating their empire from one assembly to another. He wound up
+his discourse with some theatrical talk about disinterestedness. When he
+sat down, he was greeted with enthusiastic acclamations, such as a few
+months before used to greet the stormful Mirabeau, now wrapped in
+eternal sleep amid the stillness of the new Pantheon. The folly of
+Robespierre's inferences is obvious enough. If only truth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> and reason
+ought to weigh in a legislature, then it is all the more important not
+to exclude any body of men through whom truth and reason may possibly
+enter. Robespierre had striven hard to remove all restrictions from
+admission to the electoral franchise. He did not see that to limit the
+choice of candidates was in itself the most grievous of all
+restrictions.</p>
+
+<p>The common view has been that the Constitution of 1791 perished because
+its creators were thus disabled from defending the work of their hands.
+This view led to a grave mistake four years later, after Robespierre had
+gone to his grave. The Convention, framing the Constitution of the Year
+III., decided that two-thirds of the existing assembly should keep their
+places, and that only one-third should be popularly elected. This led to
+the revolt of the Thirteenth Vend&eacute;miaire, and afterwards to the coup
+d'&eacute;tat of the Eighteenth Fructidor. In that sense, no doubt,
+Robespierre's proposal was the indirect root of much mischief. But it is
+childish to believe that if a hundred of the most prominent members of
+the Constituent had found seats in the new assembly, they would have
+saved the Constitution. Their experience, the loss of which it is the
+fashion to deplore, could have had no application to the strange
+combinations of untoward circumstance that were now rising up with such
+deadly rapidity in every quarter of the horizon, like vast sombre banks
+of impenetrable cloud. Prudence in new cases, as has been somewhere
+said, can do nothing on grounds of retro<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span>spect. The work of the
+Constituent was doomed by the very nature of things. Their assumption
+that the Revolution was made, while all France was still torn by fierce
+and unappeasable disputes as to seignorial rights, was one of the most
+striking pieces of self-deception in history. It is told how in the
+eleventh century, when the fervent hosts of the Crusaders tramped across
+Europe on their way to deliver the Holy City from the hands of the
+unbelievers, the wearied children, as they espied each new town that lay
+in their interminable march, cried out with joyful expectation, 'Is not
+this, then, Jerusalem?' So France had set out on a portentous journey,
+little knowing how far off was the end; lightly taking each poor
+halting-place for the deeply longed-for goal; and waxing more fiercely
+disappointed, as each new height that they gained only disclosed yet
+farther and more unattainable horizons. 'Alas,' said Burke, 'they little
+know how many a weary step is to be taken, before they can form
+themselves into a mass which has a true political personality.'</p>
+
+<p>An immense revolution had been effected, but by what force were its
+fruits to be guarded? Each step in the revolution had raised a host of
+irreconcilable enemies. The rights of property, the old and jealous
+associations of local independence, the traditions of personal dignity,
+the relations of the civil to the spiritual power&mdash;these were the
+momentous matters about which the lawmakers of the Constituent had
+exercised themselves. The parties of the Chamber<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span> had for these two
+years past been laying mine and countermine among the very deepest
+foundations of society. One by one each great corporation of the old
+order had been alienated from the new order. It was inevitable that it
+should be so. Let us look at one or two examples of this. The monarchy
+had imposed administrative centralisation upon France without securing
+national unity. Thus the great provinces that had been slowly added one
+after the other to the monarchy, while becoming members of the same
+kingdom, still retained different institutions and isolated usages. The
+time was now come when France should be France, and its inhabitants
+Frenchmen, and no longer Bretons, Normans, Gascons, Proven&ccedil;als. The
+Assembly by a single decree (1790) redivided the country into
+eighty-three departments. It wiped out at a stroke the separate
+administrations, the separate parlements, the peculiar privileges, and
+even the historic names of the old provinces. We need not dwell on the
+significance of this change here, but will only remark in passing that
+the stubborn disputes from the time of the Regency downwards between the
+Crown and the provincial parlements turned, under other names and in
+other forms, upon this very issue of the unification of the law. The
+Crown was with the progressive party, but it lacked the strength and
+courage to set aside retrograde local sentiment as the Constituent
+Assembly was able to set it aside.</p>
+
+<p>Then this prodigious change in the distribution of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> government was
+accompanied by no less prodigious a change in the source of power.
+Popular election replaced the old system of territorial privilege and
+aristocratic prerogative. The effect of this vital innovation, followed
+as it was a few months later by a decree abolishing titles and armorial
+bearings, was to complete the estrangement of the old privileged classes
+from the revolutionary movement. All that they had meant to concede was
+the payment of an equal land tax. What was life worth to the noble, if
+common people were to be allowed to wear arms and to command a company
+of foot or a troop of horse; if he was no longer to have thousands of
+acres left waste for the chase; if he was compelled to sue for a vote
+where he had only yesterday reigned as manorial lord; if, in short, he
+was at a stroke to lose all those delights of insolence and vanity which
+had made, not the decoration, but the very substance, of his days?</p>
+
+<p>Nor were the nobles of the sword and the red-heeled slipper the only
+outraged class. The magistracy of the provincial parliaments were
+inflamed with resentment against changes that stripped them of the power
+of exciting against the new government the same factious and
+impracticable spirit with which they had on so many occasions
+embarrassed the old. The clergy were thrown even still more violently
+into opposition. The Assembly, sorely pressed for resources, declared
+the property held by ecclesiastics, amounting to a revenue of not less
+than eight million<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span> pounds sterling a year, or double that amount in
+modern values, to be the property of the nation. Talleyrand carried a
+measure decreeing the sale of the ecclesiastical domain. The clergy were
+as intensely irritated as laymen would have been by a similar assertion
+of sovereign right. And their irritation was made still more dangerous
+by the next set of measures against them.</p>
+
+<p>The Assembly withdrew all recognition of Catholicism as the religion of
+the State; monastic vows were abolished, and orders and congregations
+suppressed; the ecclesiastical divisions were made to coincide with the
+civil divisions, a bishop being allotted to each department. What was a
+more important revolution than all, bishops and incumbents were
+henceforth to be appointed by popular election. The Assembly, who had
+always the institutions of our own country before them, meant to
+introduce into France the system of the Church of England, which was
+even then an anachronism in the land of its birth; much worse was such a
+system an anachronism, after belief had been sapped by a Voltaire and an
+Encyclop&aelig;dia. The clergy both showed and excited a mutinous spirit. The
+Assembly, by way of retort, decreed that all ecclesiastics should take
+the oath of allegiance to the civil constitution of the clergy, on pain
+of forfeiture of their benefices. Five-sixths of the clergy refused, and
+the result was an outbreak of religious fury in the great towns of the
+south and elsewhere, which recalled the violence of the sixteenth
+century and the Reformation.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Thus when the Constituent Assembly ceased from its labours, the popular
+party had to face the mocking and defiant privileged classes; the
+magistracy, whose craft and calling were gone; and the clergy and as
+many of the flocks as shared the holy vindictiveness of their pastors.
+Immense material improvements had been made, but who was to guard them
+against all these powerful and exasperated bands? No chamber could
+execute so portentous an office, least of all a chamber that was bound
+to work in accord with a King, who at the very moment when he was
+swearing fidelity to the new order of things, was sending entreaties to
+the King of Prussia and to the Emperor, his brother-in-law, to overthrow
+the new order and bring back the old. If the Revolution had achieved
+priceless gains for France, they could only be preserved on condition
+that public action was directed by those who valued these gains for
+themselves and for their children above all things else&mdash;above the
+monarchy, above the constitution, above peace, above their own sorry
+lives. There was only one party who showed this passionate devotion,
+this fanatical resolution not to suffer the work that had been done to
+be undone, and never to allow France to sink back from exalted national
+life into the lethargy of national death. That party was the Jacobins,
+and, above all, the austere and rigorous Jacobins of Paris. On their
+ascendancy depended the triumph of the Revolution, and on the triumph of
+the Revolution depended the salvation of France.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> Their ascendancy meant
+a Jacobin dictatorship, and against this, as against dictatorship in all
+its forms, many things have been said, and truly said. But the one most
+important thing that can be said about Jacobin dictatorship is that, in
+spite of all the dolorous mishaps and hateful misdeeds that marked its
+course, it was still the only instrument capable of concentrating and
+utilising the dispersed social energy of the French people. The crisis
+was not a crisis of logic but of force, and the Jacobins alone
+understood, as the old Covenanters had understood, that problems of
+force are not solved by phrases, but by mastery and the sword.</p>
+
+<p>The great popular club of Paris was the centre of all those who looked
+at events in this spirit. The Legislative Assembly, the successor of the
+Constituent, met in the month of October 1791. Like its predecessor, the
+Legislative contained a host of excellent and patriotic men, and they at
+once applied themselves to the all-important task, which the Constituent
+had left so deplorably incomplete, of finally breaking down the old
+feudal rights. The most important group in the new chamber were the
+deputies from the Gironde. Events soon revealed violent dissents between
+the Girondins and the Jacobins, but, for some months after the meeting
+of the Legislative, Girondins and Jacobins represented together in
+unbroken unity the great popular party. From this time until the fall of
+the monarchy, the whole of this popular party in all its branches found
+their rallying-place, not in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> the Assembly, but in the Jacobin Club; and
+the ascendancy of the Jacobin Club embodied the dictatorship of Paris.
+It was only from Paris that the whole circle of events could be
+commanded. When the peasants had got what they wanted, that is to say
+the emancipation of the land, they were ready to think that the
+Revolution was in safety and at an end. They were in no position to see
+the enmity of the exiles, the dangerous selfishness of Austria and
+Prussia, the disloyal machinations of the court, the reactionary
+sentiment of La Vend&eacute;e, the absolute unworkableness of the new
+constitution. Arthur Young, in the height of the agitations of the
+Constituent Assembly, found himself at Moulins, the capital of the
+Bourbonnais, and on the great post-road to Italy. He went to the best
+coffee-house in the town, and found as many as twenty tables spread for
+company, but as for a newspaper, he says he might as well have asked for
+an elephant. In the capital of a great province, the seat of an
+intendant, at a moment like that, with a National Assembly voting a
+revolution, and not a newspaper to tell the people whether Fayette,
+Mirabeau, or Lewis XVI. were on the throne! Could such a people as this,
+he cries, ever have made a revolution or become free? 'Never in a
+thousand centuries: the enlightened mob of Paris have done the whole.'
+And that was the plain truth. What was involved in such a truth, we
+shall see presently.</p>
+
+<p>Robespierre had now risen to be one of the foremost men in France. To
+borrow the figure of an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> older chief of French faction, from trifling
+among the violins in the orchestra, he had ascended to the stage itself,
+and had a right to perform leading parts. Disqualified for sitting in
+the Assembly, he wielded greater power than ever in the Club. The
+Constituent had been full of his enemies. 'Alone with my own soul,' he
+once cried to the Jacobins, 'how could I have borne struggles that were
+beyond any human strength, if I had not raised my spirit to God?' This
+isolation marked him with a kind of theocratic distinction. These
+communings with the unseen powers gave a certain indefinable prerogative
+to a man, even among the children of the century of Voltaire. Condorcet,
+the youngest of the intimates and disciples of Voltaire, of D'Alembert,
+of Turgot, was the first to sound bitter warning that Robespierre was at
+heart a priest. The suggestion was more than a gibe. Robespierre had the
+typic sacerdotal temperament, its sense of personal importance, its thin
+unction, its private leanings to the stake and the cord; and he had one
+of those deplorable natures that seem as if they had never in their
+lives known the careless joys of a springtime. By and by, from mere
+priest he developed into the deadlier carnivore, the Inquisitor.</p>
+
+<p>The absence of advantages of bodily presence has never been fatal to the
+pretensions of the pontiff. Robespierre was only a couple of inches
+above five feet in height, but the Grand Monarch himself was hardly
+more. His eyes were small and weak, and he usually wore spectacles; his
+face was pitted by the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> marks of small-pox; his complexion was dull and
+sometimes livid; the tones of his voice were dry and shrill; and he
+spoke with the vulgar accent of his province. Such is the accepted
+tradition, and there is no reason to dissent from it. It is fair,
+however, to remember that Robespierre's enemies had command of his
+historic reputation at its source, and this is always a great advantage
+for faction, if not for truth. So Robespierre's voice and person may
+have been maligned, just as Aristophanes may have been a calumniator
+when he accused Cleon of having an intolerably loud voice and smelling
+of the tanyard. What is certain is that Robespierre was a master of
+effective oratory adapted for a violent popular audience, to impress, to
+persuade, and to command. The Convention would have yawned, if it had
+not trembled under him, but the Jacobin Club never found him tedious.
+Robespierre's style had no richness either of feeling or of phrase; no
+fervid originality, no happy violences. If we turn from a page of
+Rousseau to a page of Robespierre, we feel that the disciple has none of
+the thrilling sonorousness of the master; the glow and the ardour have
+become metallic; the long-drawn plangency is parodied by shrill notes of
+splenetic complaint. The rhythm has no broad wings; the phrases have no
+quality of radiance; the oratorical glimpses never lift the spirit into
+new worlds. We are never conscious of those great pulses of strong
+emotion that shake and vibrate through the nobly-measured periods of
+Cicero or Bossuet or Burke.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span> Robespierre could not rival the vivid and
+highly-coloured declamation of Vergniaud; his speeches were never heated
+with the ardent passion that poured like a torrent of fire through some
+of the orations of Isnard; nor, above all, had he any mastery of that
+dialect of the Titans, by which Danton convulsed an audience with fear,
+with amazement, or with the spirit of defiant endeavour. The absence of
+these intenser qualities did not make Robespierre's speeches less
+effective for their own purpose. On the contrary, when the air has
+become torrid, and passionate utterance is cheap, then severity in form
+is very likely to pass for good sense in substance. That Robespierre had
+decent fluency, copiousness, and finish, need hardly be said. The French
+have an artistic sense; they have never accepted our own whimsical
+doctrine, that a man's politics must be sagacious, if his speaking is
+only clumsy enough. Robespierre more than once showed himself ready with
+a forcible reply on critical occasions: this only makes him an
+illustration the more of the good oratorical rule, that he is most
+likely to come well out of the emergency of an improvisation, who is
+usually most careful to prepare. Robespierre was as solicitous about the
+correctness of his speech, as he was about the neatness of his clothes;
+he no more grudged the pains given to the polishing of his discourses
+than he grudged the time given every day to the powdering of his hair.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing was more remarkable than his dexterity in presenting his case.
+James Mill used to point out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span> to his son among other skilful arts of
+Demosthenes, these two: first, that he said everything important to his
+purpose at the exact moment when he had brought the minds of his hearers
+into the state most fitted to receive it; second, that he insinuated
+gradually and indirectly into their minds ideas which would have roused
+opposition if they had been expressed more directly. Mr. Mill once
+called the attention of the present writer to exactly the same kind of
+rhetorical skill in the speeches of Robespierre. The reader may do well
+to turn, for excellent specimens of this, to the speech of January 11,
+1792, against the war, or that of May 1794 against atheism. The logic is
+stringent, but the premises are arbitrary. Robespierre is as one who
+should iterate indisputable propositions of abstract geometry and
+mechanics, while men are craving an architect who shall bridge the gulf
+of waters. Exuberance of high words no longer conceals the sterility of
+his ideas and the shallowness of his method. We should say of his
+speeches, as of so much of the speaking and writing of the time, that it
+is transparent and smooth, but there is none of that quality which the
+critics of painting call Texture.</p>
+
+<p>His listeners, however, in the old refectory of the Convent of the
+Jacobins took little heed of these things; the matter was too absorbing,
+the issue too vital. A hundred years before, the hunted Covenanters of
+the Western Lowlands, with Claverhouse's dragoons a few miles off,
+exulted in the endless exhortations and expositions of their hill
+preachers:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span> they relished nothing so keenly as three hours of
+Mucklewrath, followed by three hours more of Peter Poundtext. We now
+find the jargon of the Mucklewraths and the Poundtexts of the Solemn
+League and Covenant, dead as it is, still not devoid of the picturesque
+and the impressive. If we cannot say the same of the great preacher of
+the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the reason is partly that time has
+not yet softened the tones, and partly that there is no one in all the
+world with whom it is so difficult to sympathise, as with the narrower
+fanatics of our own particular faith.</p>
+
+<p>We have still to mark the trait that above everything else gave to
+Robespierre the trust and confidence of Paris. As men listened to him,
+they had full faith in the integrity of the speaker. And Robespierre in
+one way deserved this confidence. He was eminently the possessor of a
+conscience. When the strain of circumstance in the last few months of
+his life pressed him towards wrong, at least before doing wrong he was
+forced to lie to his own conscience. This is a kind of honesty, as the
+world goes. In the Salon of 1791 an artist exhibited Robespierre's
+portrait, simply inscribing it, <i>The Incorruptible</i>. Throngs passed
+before it every day, and ratified the honourable designation by eager
+murmurs of approval. The democratic journals were loud in panegyric on
+the unsleeping sentinel of liberty. They loved to speak of him as the
+modern Fabricius, and delighted to recall the words of Pyrrhus, that it
+is easier to turn the sun<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span> from its course, than to turn Fabricius from
+the path of honour. Patriotic parents eagerly besought him to be sponsor
+for their children. Ladies of wealth, including at least one
+countrywoman of our own, vainly entreated him to accept their purses,
+for women are quick to recognise the temperament of the priest, and
+recognising they adore. A rich widow of Nantes besought him with
+pertinacious tenderness to accept not only her purse but her hand.
+Mirabeau's sister hailed him as an eagle floating through the blue
+heavens.</p>
+
+<p>Robespierre's life was frugal and simple, as must always be seemly in
+the spokesman of the dumb multitude whose lives are very hard. He had a
+single room in the house of Duplay, at the extreme west end of the long
+Rue Saint Honor&eacute;, half a mile from the Jacobin Club, and less than that
+from the Riding School of the Tuileries, where the Constituent and
+Legislative Assemblies held session. His room, which served him for
+bed-chamber as well as for the uses of the day, was scantily furnished,
+and he shared the homely fare of his host. Duplay was a carpenter, a
+sworn follower of Robespierre, and the whole family cherished their
+guest as if he had been a son and a brother. Between him and the eldest
+daughter of the house there grew up a more tender sentiment, and
+Robespierre looked forward to the joys of the hearth, so soon as his
+country should be delivered from the oppressors without and the traitors
+within.</p>
+
+<p>Eagerly as Robespierre delighted in his popularity,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span> he intended it to
+be a force and not a decoration. An occasion of testing his influence
+arose in the winter of 1791. The situation had become more and more
+difficult. The court was more disloyal and more perverse, as its hopes
+that the nightmare would come to an end became fainter. In the summer of
+1791, the German Emperor, the King of Prussia, and minor champions of
+retrograde causes issued the famous Declaration of Pilnitz. The menace
+of intervention was the one element needed to make the position of the
+monarchy desperate. It roused France to fever heat. For along with the
+foreign kings were the French princes of the blood and the French
+nobles. In the spring of 1792, the Assembly forced the King to declare
+war against Austria. Robespierre, in spite of the strong tide of warlike
+feeling, led the Jacobin opposition to the war. This is one of the most
+sagacious acts of his career, for the hazards of the conflict were
+terrible. If the foreigners and the emigrant nobles were victorious, all
+that the Revolution had won would be instantly and irretrievably lost.
+If, on the other hand, the French armies were victorious, one of two
+disasters might follow. Either the troops might become a weapon in the
+hands of the court and the reactionary party, for the suppression of all
+the progressive parties alike; or else their general might make himself
+supreme. Robespierre divined, what the Girondins did not, that Narbonne
+and the court, in accepting the cry for war, were secretly designing,
+first, to crush the faction of emi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>grant nobles, then to make the King
+popular at home, and thus finally to construct a strong royalist army.
+The Constitutional party in the Legislative Assembly had the same ideas
+as Narbonne. The Girondins sought war; first, from a genuine, if not a
+profoundly wise, enthusiasm for liberty, which they would fain have
+spread all over the world; and next, because they thought that war would
+increase their popularity, and give them decisive control of the
+situation.</p>
+
+<p>The first effect of the war declared in April 1792 was to shake down the
+throne. Operations had no sooner begun than the King became an object of
+bitter and amply warranted suspicion. Neither the leaders nor the people
+had forgotten his flight a year before to place himself at the head of
+the foreign invaders, nor the letter that he had left behind him for the
+National Assembly, protesting against all that had been done. They were
+again reminded of what short shrift they might expect if the King's
+friends should come back. The Duke of Brunswick at the head of the
+foreign army set out on his march, and issued his famous proclamation to
+the inhabitants of France. He demanded immediate and unconditional
+submission; he threatened with fire and sword every town, village, or
+hamlet, that should dare to defend itself; and finally, he swore that if
+the smallest violence or insult were done to the King or his family, the
+city of Paris should be handed over to military execution and absolute
+destruction. This insensate document bears marks in every line of the
+implacable hate and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span> burning thirst for revenge that consumed the
+aristocratic refugees. Only civil war can awaken such rage as
+Brunswick's manifesto betrayed. It was drawn up by the French nobles at
+Coblenz. He merely signed it. The reply to it was the memorable
+insurrection of the Tenth of August 1792. The King was thrown into
+prison, and the Legislative Assembly made way for the National
+Convention.</p>
+
+<p>Robespierre's part in the great rising of August was only secondary.
+Only a few weeks before he had started a journal and written articles in
+a constitutional sense. M. d'H&eacute;ricault believes a story that
+Robespierre's aim in this had been to have himself accepted as tutor for
+the young Dauphin. It is impossible to prove a negative, but we find
+great difficulty in believing that such a post could ever have been an
+object of Robespierre's ambition. Now and always he showed a rather
+singular preference for the substance of power over its glitter. He was
+vain and an egoist, but in spite of this, and in spite of his passion
+for empty phrases, he was not without a sense of reality.</p>
+
+<p>The insurrection of the 10th of August, however, was the idea, not of
+Robespierre, but of a more commanding personage, who now became one of
+the foremost of the Jacobin chiefs. De Maistre, that ardent champion of
+reaction, found a striking argument for the presence of the divine hand
+in the Revolution, in the intense mediocrity of the revolutionary
+leaders. How could such men, he asked, have achieved such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span> results, if
+they had not been instruments of the directing will of heaven? Danton at
+any rate is above this caustic criticism. Danton was of the Herculean
+type of a Luther, though without Luther's deep vision of spiritual
+things; or a Chatham, though without Chatham's august majesty of life;
+or a Cromwell, though without Cromwell's calm steadfastness of patriotic
+purpose. His visage and port seemed to declare his character: dark
+overhanging brows; eyes that had the gleam of lightning; a savage mouth;
+an immense head; the voice of a Stentor. Madame Roland pictured him as a
+fiercer Sardanapalus. Artists called him Jove the Thunderer. His enemies
+saw in him the Satan of the Paradise Lost. He was no moral regenerator;
+the difference between him and Robespierre is typified in Danton's
+version of an old saying, that he who hates vices hates men. He was not
+free from that careless life-contemning desperation, which sometimes
+belongs to forcible natures. Danton cannot be called noble, because
+nobility implies a purity, an elevation, and a kind of seriousness which
+were not his. He was too heedless of his good name, and too blind to the
+truth that though right and wrong may be near neighbours, yet the line
+that separates them is of an awful sacredness. If Robespierre passed for
+a hypocrite by reason of his scruple, Danton seemed a desperado by his
+airs of 'immoral thoughtlessness.' But the world forgives much to a
+royal size, and Danton was one of the men who strike deep notes. He had
+that largeness of motive, fulness of nature,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span> and capaciousness of mind,
+which will always redeem a multitude of infirmities.</p>
+
+<p>Though the author of some of the most tremendous and far-sounding
+phrases of an epoch that was only too rich in them, yet phrases had no
+empire over him; he was their master, not their dupe. Of all the men who
+succeeded Mirabeau as directors of the unchained forces, we feel that
+Danton alone was in his true element. Action, which poisoned the blood
+of such men as Robespierre, and drove such men as Vergniaud out of their
+senses with exaltation, was to Danton his native sphere. When France was
+for a moment discouraged, it was he who nerved her to new effort by the
+electrifying cry, '<i>We must dare, and again dare, and without end
+dare!</i>' If his rivals or his friends seemed too intent on trifles, too
+apt to confound side issues with the central aim of the battle, Danton
+was ever ready to urge them to take a juster measure:&mdash;'<i>When the
+edifice is all ablaze, I take little heed of the knaves who are
+pilfering the household goods; I rush to put out the flames.</i>' When base
+egoism was compromising a cause more priceless than the personality of
+any man, it was Danton who made them ashamed by the soul-inspiring
+exclamation, '<i>Let my name be blotted out and my memory perish, if only
+France may be free.</i>' The Girondins denounced the popular clubs of Paris
+as hives of lawlessness and outrage. Danton warned them that it were
+wiser to go to these seething societies and to guide them, than to waste
+breath in futile denunciation. 'A nation in revolution,' he cried<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span> to
+them, in a superb figure, 'is like the bronze boiling and foaming and
+purifying itself in the cauldron. Not yet is the statue of Liberty cast.
+Fiercely boils the metal; have an eye on the furnace, or the flame will
+surely scorch you.' If there was murderous work below the hatches, that
+was all the more reason why the steersman should keep his hand strong
+and ready on the wheel, with an eye quick for each new drift in the
+hurricane, and each new set in the raging currents. This is ever the
+figure under which one conceives Danton&mdash;a Titanic shape doing battle
+with the fury of the seas, yielding while flood upon flood sweeps wildly
+over him, and then with unshaken foothold and undaunted front once more
+surveying the waste of waters, and striving with dexterous energy to
+force the straining vessel over the waters of the bar.</p>
+
+<p>La Fayette had called the huge giant of popular force from its squalid
+lurking-places, and now he trembled before its presence, and fled from
+it shrieking, with averted hands. Marat thrust swords into the giant's
+half-unwilling grasp, and plied him with bloody incitement to slay hip
+and thigh, and so filled the land with a horror that has not faded from
+out of men's minds to this day. Danton instantly discerned that the
+problem was to preserve revolutionary energy, and still to persuade the
+insurgent forces to retire once more within their boundaries.
+Robespierre discerned this too, but he was paralysed and bewildered by
+his own principles, as the convinced doctrinaire is so apt to be amid
+the perplexities of practice. The teaching<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span> of Rousseau was ever pouring
+like thin smoke among his ideas, and clouding his view of actual
+conditions. The Tenth of August produced a considerable change in
+Robespierre's point of view. It awoke him to the precipitous steepness
+of the slope down which the revolutionary car was rushing headlong. His
+faith in the infallibility of the people suffered no shock, but he was
+in a moment alive to the need of walking warily, and his whole march
+from now until the end, twenty-three months later, became timorous,
+cunning, and oblique. His intelligence seemed to move in subterranean
+tunnels, with the gleam of an equivocal premiss at one end, and the mist
+of a vague conclusion at the other.</p>
+
+<p>The enthusiastic pedant, with his narrow understanding, his thin purism,
+and his idyllic sentimentalism, found that the summoning archangel of
+his paradise proved to be a ruffian with a pike. The shock must have
+been tremendous. Robespierre did not quail nor retreat; he only revised
+his notion of the situation. A curious interview once took place between
+him and Marat. Robespierre began by assuring the Friend of the People
+that he quite understood the atrocious demands for blood with which the
+columns of Marat's newspaper were filled, to be merely useful
+exaggerations of his real designs. Marat repelled the disparaging
+imputation of clemency and common sense, and talked in his familiar vein
+of poniarding brigands, burning despots alive in their palaces, and
+impaling the traitors of the Assembly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span> on their own benches.
+'Robespierre,' says Marat, 'listened to me with affright; he turned pale
+and said nothing. The interview confirmed the opinion I had always had
+of him, that he united the integrity of a thoroughly honest man and the
+zeal of a good patriot, with the enlightenment of a wise senator, but
+that he was without either the views or the audacity of a real
+statesman.' The picture is instructive, for it shows us Robespierre's
+invariable habit of leaving violence and iniquity unrebuked; of
+conciliating the practitioners of violence and iniquity; and of
+contenting himself with an inward hope of turning the world into a right
+course by fine words. He had no audacity in Marat's sense, but he was no
+coward. He knew, as all these men knew, that almost from hour to hour he
+carried his life in his hand, yet he declined to seek shelter in the
+obscurity which saved such men as Siey&egrave;s. But if he had courage, he had
+not the initiative of a man of action. He invented none of the ideas or
+methods of the Revolution, not even the Reign of Terror, but he was very
+dexterous in accepting or appropriating what more audacious spirits than
+himself had devised and enforced. The pedant, cursed with the ambition
+to be a ruler of men, is a curious study. He would be glad not to go too
+far, and yet his chief dread is lest he be left behind. His
+consciousness of pure aims allows him to become an accomplice in the
+worst crimes. Suspecting himself at bottom to be a theorist, he hastens
+to clear his character as man of practice<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span> by conniving at an enormity.
+Thus, in September 1792, a band of miscreants committed the grievous
+massacres in the prisons of Paris. Robespierre, though the best evidence
+goes to show that he not only did not abet the prison murders, but in
+his heart deplored them, yet after the event did not scruple to justify
+what had been done. This was the beginning of a long course of
+compliance with sanguinary misdeeds, for which Robespierre has been as
+hotly execrated as if he prompted them. We do not, for the moment,
+measure the relative degrees of guilt that attached to mere compliance
+on the one hand, and cruel origination on the other. But his position in
+the Revolution is not rightly understood, unless we recognise him as
+being in almost every case an accessory after the fact.</p>
+
+<p>Between the fall of Lewis in 1792 and the fall of Robespierre in 1794,
+France was the scene of two main series of events. One set comprises the
+repulse of the invaders, the suppression of an extensive civil war, and
+the attempted reconstruction of a social framework. The other comprises
+the rapid phases of an internecine struggle of violent and short-lived
+factions. By an unhappy fatality, due partly to anti-democratic
+prejudice, and partly to men's unfailing passion for melodrama, the
+Reign of Terror has been popularly taken for the central and most
+important part of the revolutionary epic. This is nearly as absurd as it
+would be to make Gustave Flourens' manifestation of the Fifth of
+October, or the rising<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span> of the Thirty-first of October, the most
+prominent features in a history of the war of French defence in our own
+day. In truth, the Terror was a mere episode; and just as the rising of
+October 1870 was due to Marshal Bazaine's capitulation at Metz, it is
+easy to see that, with one exception, every violent movement in Paris,
+from 1792 to 1794, was due to menace or disaster on the frontier. Every
+one of the famous days of Paris was an answer to some enemy without. The
+storm of the Tuileries on the Tenth of August, as we have already said,
+was the response to Brunswick's proclamation. The bloody days of
+September were the reaction of panic at the capture of Longwy and Verdun
+by the Prussians. The surrender of Cambrai provoked the execution of
+Marie Antoinette. The defeat of Aix-la-Chapelle produced the abortive
+insurrection of the Tenth of March; and the treason of Dumouriez, the
+reverses of Custine, and the rebellion in La Vend&eacute;e, produced the
+effectual insurrection of the Thirty-first of May 1793. The last of
+these two risings of Paris, headed by the Commune, against the
+Convention which was until then controlled by the Girondins, at length
+gave the government of France and the defence of the Revolution
+definitely over to the Jacobins. Their patriotic dictatorship lasted
+unbroken for a short period of ten months, and then the great party
+broke up into factions. The splendid triumphs of the dictatorship have
+been, in England at any rate, too usually forgotten, and only the crimes
+of the factions<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span> remembered. Robespierre's history unfortunately belongs
+to the less important battle.</p>
+
+
+<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2>
+
+<p>The Girondins were driven out of the Convention by the insurgent
+Parisians at the beginning of June 1793. The movement may be roughly
+compared to that of the Independents in our own Rebellion, when the army
+compelled the withdrawal of eleven of the Presbyterian leaders from the
+parliament; or, it may recall Pride's memorable Purge of the same famous
+assembly. Both cases illustrate the common truth that large deliberative
+bodies, be they never so excellent for purposes of legislation, and even
+for a general control of the executive government in ordinary times, are
+found to be essentially unfit for directing a military crisis. If there
+are any historic examples that at first seem to contradict such a
+proposition, it will be found that the bodies in question were close
+aristocracies, like the Great Council of Venice, or the Senate of Rome
+in the strong days of the Commonwealth; they were never the creatures of
+popular election, with varying aims and a diversified political spirit.
+Modern publicists have substituted the divine right of assemblies for
+the old divine right of monarchies. Those who condone the violence done
+to the King on the Tenth of August, and even acquiesce in his execution
+five months afterwards, are relentless<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span> against the violence done to the
+Convention on the Thirty-first of May. We confess ourselves unable to
+follow this transfer of the superstition of sacrosanctity from a king to
+a chamber. No doubt, the sooner a nation acquires a settled government,
+the better for it, provided the government be efficient. But if it be
+not efficient, the mischief of actively suppressing it may well be fully
+outweighed by the mischief of retaining it. We have no wish to smooth
+over the perversities of a revolutionary time; they cost a nation very
+dear; but if all the elements of the state are in furious convulsion and
+uncontrollable effervescence, then it is childish to measure the march
+of events by the standard of happier days of social peace and political
+order. The prospect before France at the violent close of Girondin
+supremacy was as formidable as any nation has ever yet had to confront
+in the history of the world. Rome was not more critically placed when
+the defeat of Varro on the plain of Cann&aelig; had broken up her alliances
+and ruined her army. The brave patriots of the Netherlands had no
+gloomier outlook at that dolorous moment when the Prince of Orange had
+left them, and Alva had been appointed to bring them back by rapine,
+conflagration, and murder, under the loathed yoke of the Spanish tyrant.</p>
+
+<p>Let us realise the conditions that Robespierre and Danton and the other
+Jacobin leaders had now to face. In the north-west one division of the
+fugitive Girondins was forming an army at Caen; in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span> south-west
+another division was doing the same at Bordeaux. Marseilles and Lyons
+were rallying all the disaffected and reactionary elements in the
+south-east. La Vend&eacute;e had flamed out in wild rebellion for Church and
+King. The strong places on the north frontier, and the strong places on
+the east, were in the hands of the foreign enemy. The fate of the
+Revolution lay in the issue of a struggle between Paris, with less than
+a score of departments on her side, and all the rest of France and the
+whole European coalition marshalled against her. And even this was not
+the worst. In Paris itself a very considerable proportion of its
+half-million of inhabitants were disaffected to the revolutionary cause.
+Reactionary historians dwell on the fact that such risings as that of
+the Tenth of August were devised by no more than half of the sections
+into which Paris was divided. It was common, they say, for half a dozen
+individuals to take upon themselves to represent the fourteen or fifteen
+hundred other members of a section. But what better proof can we have
+that if France was to be delivered from restored feudalism and foreign
+spoliation, the momentous task must be performed by those who had sense
+to discern the awful peril, and energy to encounter it?</p>
+
+<p>The Girondins had made their incapacity plain. The execution of the King
+had filled them with alarm, and with hatred against the ruder and more
+robust party who had forced that startling act of vengeance upon them.
+Puny social disgusts prevented them<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span> from co-operating with Danton or
+with Robespierre. Prussia and Austria were not more redoubtable or more
+hateful to them than was Paris, and they wasted, in futile
+recriminations about the September massacres or the alleged peculations
+of municipal officers, the time and the energy that should have been
+devoted without let or interruption to the settlement of the
+administration and the repulse of the foe. It is impossible to think of
+such fine characters as Vergniaud or Madame Roland without admiration,
+or of their untimely fate without pity. But the deliverance of a people
+beset by strong and implacable enemies could not wait on mere good
+manners and fastidious sentiments, when these comely things were in
+company with the most stupendous want of foresight ever shown by a
+political party. How can we measure the folly of men who so missed the
+conditions of the problem as to cry out in the Convention itself, almost
+within earshot of the Jacobin Club, that if any insult were offered to
+the national representation, the departments would rise, 'Paris would be
+annihilated; and men would come to search on the banks of the Seine
+whether such a city had ever existed!' It was to no purpose that Danton
+urgently rebuked the senseless animosity with which the Right poured
+incessant malediction on the Left, and the wild shrieking hate with
+which the Left retaliated on the Right. The battle was to the death, and
+it was the Girondins who first menaced their political foes with
+vengeance and the guillotine. As it happened, the treason of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span> Dumouriez
+and their own ineptitude destroyed them before revenge was within reach.
+Such a consummation was fortunate for their country. It was the
+Girondins whose want of union and energy had by the middle of 1793
+brought France to distraction and imminent ruin. It was a short year of
+Jacobin government that by the summer of 1794 had welded the nation
+together again, and finally conquered the invasion. The city of the
+Seine had once more shown itself what it had been for nine centuries,
+ever since the days of Odo, Count of Paris and first King of the French,
+not merely a capital, but France itself, 'its living heart and surest
+bulwark.'</p>
+
+<p>The immediate instrument of so rapid and extraordinary an achievement
+was the Committee of Public Safety. The French have never shown their
+quick genius for organisation with more triumphant vigour. While the
+Girondins were still powerful, nine members of the Convention had been
+constituted an executive committee, April 6, 1793. They were in fact a
+kind of permanent cabinet, with practical irresponsibility. In the
+summer of 1793 the number was increased from nine to twelve, and these
+twelve were the centre of the revolutionary government. They fell into
+three groups. First, there were the scientific or practical
+administrators, of whom the most eminent was Carnot. Next came the
+directors of internal policy, the pure revolutionists, headed by Billaud
+de Varennes. Finally, there was a trio whose business it was to
+translate action into the phrases of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span> revolutionary policy. This famous
+group was Robespierre, Couthon, and Saint Just.</p>
+
+<p>Besides the Committee of Public Safety there was another chief
+governmental committee, that of General Security. Its functions were
+mainly connected with the police, the arrests, and the prisons, but in
+all serious affairs the two Committees deliberated in common. There were
+also fourteen other groups of various size, taken from the Convention;
+they applied themselves with admirable zeal, and usually not with more
+zeal than skill, to schemes of public instruction, of finance, of
+legislation, of the administration of justice, and a host of other civil
+reforms, of all of which Napoleon Bonaparte was by and by to reap the
+credit. These bodies completed the civil revolution, which the
+Constituent and the Legislative Assemblies had left so mischievously
+incomplete that, as soon as ever the Convention had assembled, it was
+besieged by a host of petitioners praying them to explain and to pursue
+the abolition of the old feudal rights. Everything had still been left
+uncertain in men's minds, even upon that greatest of all the
+revolutionary questions. The feudal division of the committee of general
+legislation had in this eleventh hour to decide innumerable issues, from
+those of the widest practical importance, down to the prayer of a remote
+commune to be relieved from the charge of maintaining a certain mortuary
+lamp which had been a matter of seignorial obligation. The work done by
+the radical jurisconsults was never undone. It was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span> the great and
+durable reward of the struggle. And we have to remember that these
+industrious and efficient bodies, as well as all other public bodies and
+functionaries whatever, were placed by the definite revolutionary
+constitution of 1793 under the direct orders of the Committee of Public
+Safety.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It is hardly possible even now for any one who exults in the memory of
+the great deliverance of a brilliant and sociable people, to stand
+unmoved before the walls of that palace which Philibert Delorme reared
+for Catherine de' Medici, and which was thrown into ruin by the madness
+of a band of desperate men in our own days. Lewis had walked forth from
+the Tuileries on the fatal morning of the Tenth of August, holding his
+children by the hand, and lightly noticing, as he traversed the gardens,
+how early that year the leaves were falling. Lewis had by this time
+followed the fallen leaves into nothingness. The palace of the kings was
+now styled the Palace of the Nation, and the new republic carried on its
+work surrounded by the outward associations of the old monarchy. The
+Convention after the spring of 1793 held its sittings in what had
+formerly been the palace theatre. Fierce men from the Faubourgs of St.
+Antoine and St. Marceau, and fiercer women from the markets, shouted
+savage applause or menace from galleries, where not so long ago the
+Italian buffoons had amused the perpetual leisure of the finest ladies
+and proudest grandees of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span> France. The Committee of General Security
+occupied the Pavillon de Marsan, looking over a dingy space that the
+conqueror at Rivoli afterwards made the most dazzling street in Europe.
+The Committee of Public Safety sat in the Pavillon de Flore, at the
+opposite end of the Tuileries on the river bank. The approaches were
+protected by guns and by a bodyguard, while inside there flitted to and
+fro a cloud of familiars, who have been compared by the enemies of the
+great Committee to the mutes of the court of the Grand Turk. Any one who
+had business with this awful body had to grope his way along gloomy
+corridors, that were dimly lighted by a single lamp at either end. The
+room in which the Committee sat round a table of green cloth was
+incongruously gay with the clocks, the bronzes, the mirrors, the
+tapestries, of the ruined court. The members met at eight in the morning
+and worked until one; from one to four they attended the sitting of the
+Convention. In the evening they met again, and usually sat until night
+was far advanced. It was no wonder if their hue became cadaverous, their
+eyes hollow and bloodshot, their brows stern, their glance preoccupied
+and sinister. Between ten and eleven every evening a sombre piece of
+business was transacted, which has half effaced in the memory of
+posterity all the heroic industry of the rest of the twenty-four hours.
+It was then that Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor, brought an
+account of his day's labour; how the revolutionary tribunal was working,
+how many had<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span> been convicted and how many acquitted, how large or how
+small had been the batch of the guillotine since the previous night.
+Across the breadth of the gardens, beyond their trees and fountains,
+stood the Monster itself, with its cruel symmetry, its colour as of the
+blood of the dead, its unheeding knife, neutral as the Fates.</p>
+
+<p>Robespierre has been held responsible for all the violences of the
+revolutionary government, and his position on the Committee appeared to
+be exceedingly strong. It was, however, for a long time much less strong
+in reality than it seemed: all depended upon successfully playing off
+one force against another, and at the same time maintaining himself at
+the centre of the see-saw. Robespierre was the literary and rhetorical
+member of the band; he was the author of the strident manifestoes in
+which Europe listened with exasperation to the audacious hopes and
+unfaltering purpose of the new France. This had the effect of investing
+him in the eyes of foreign nations with supreme and undisputed authority
+over the government. The truth is, that Robespierre was both disliked
+and despised by his colleagues. They thought of him as a mere maker of
+useful phrases; he in turn secretly looked down upon them, as the man
+who has a doctrine and a system in his head always looks down upon the
+man who lives from hand to mouth. If the Committee had been in the place
+of a government which has no opposition to fear, Robespierre would have
+been one of its least powerful members.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span> But although the government was
+strong, there were at least three potent elements of opposition even
+within the ranks of the dominant revolutionary party itself.</p>
+
+<p>Three bodies in Paris were, each of them, the centre of an influence
+that might at any moment become the triumphant rival of the Committee of
+Public Safety. These bodies were, first, the Convention; second, the
+Commune of Paris; and thirdly, the Jacobin Club. The jealousy thus
+existing outside the Committee would have made any failure instantly
+destructive. At one moment, at the end of 1793, it was only the
+surrender of Toulon that saved the Committee from a hostile motion in
+the Convention, and such a motion would have sent half of them to the
+guillotine. They were reviled by the extreme party who ruled at the Town
+Hall for not carrying the policy of extermination far enough. They were
+reproached by Danton and his powerful section for carrying that policy
+too far. They were discredited by the small band of intriguers, like
+Bazire, who identified government with peculation. Finally, they were
+haunted by the shadow of a fear, which events were by and by to prove
+only too substantial, lest one of their military agents on the frontier
+should make himself their master. The key to the struggle of the
+factions between the winter of 1793 and the revolution of the summer of
+1794 is the vigorous resolve of the governing Committees not to part
+with power. The drama is one of the most exciting in the history<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span> of
+faction; it abounds in rapid turns and unexpected shifts, upon which the
+student may spend many a day and many a night, and after all he is
+forced to leave off in despair of threading an accurate way through the
+labyrinth of passion and intrigue. The broad traits of the situation,
+however, are tolerably simple. The difficulty was to find a principle of
+government which the people could be induced to accept. 'The rights of
+men and the new principles of liberty and equality,' Burke said, 'were
+very unhandy instruments for those who wished to establish a system of
+tranquillity and order. The factions,' he added with fierce sarcasm,
+'were to accomplish the purposes of order, morality, and submission to
+the laws, from the principles of atheism, profligacy, and sedition. They
+endeavoured to establish distinctions, by the belief of which they hoped
+to keep the spirit of murder safely bottled up and sealed for their own
+purposes, without endangering themselves by the fumes of the poison
+which they prepared for their enemies.' This is a ferocious and
+passionate version, but it is substantially not an unreal account of the
+position.</p>
+
+<p>Upon one point all parties agreed, and that was the necessity of
+founding the government upon force, and force naturally meant Terror.
+Their plea was that of Dido to Ilioneus and the stormbeaten sons of
+Dardanus, when they complained that her people had drawn the sword upon
+them, and barbarously denied the hospitality of the sandy shore:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class='center'>
+Res dura et regni novitas me talia cogunt Moliri.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>And that pithy chapter in Machiavelli's <i>Prince</i> which treats of cruelty
+and clemency, and whether it be better to be loved or feared,
+anticipates the defence of the Terrorists, in the maxim that for a new
+prince it is impossible to avoid the name of cruel, because all new
+states abound in many perils. The difference arose on the question when
+Terror should be considered to have done as much of its work as it could
+be expected to do. This difference again was connected with difference
+of conception as to the type of the society which was ultimately to
+emerge from the existing chaos. Billaud-Varennes, the guiding spirit of
+the Committees, was without any conception of this kind. He was a man of
+force pure and simple. Danton was equally untouched by dreams of social
+transformation; his philosophy, so far as he had a definite philosophy,
+was, in spite of one or two inconsistent utterances, materialistic: and
+materialism, when it takes root in a sane, perspicacious, and indulgent
+character, as in the case of Danton, and, to take a better-known
+example, in the case of Jefferson, usually leads to a sound and positive
+theory of politics; chimeras have no place in it, though a rational
+social hope has the first place of all. Neither Danton nor Billaud
+expected a millennium; their only aim was to shape France into a
+coherent political personality, and the war between them turned upon the
+policy of prolonging the Terror after the frontiers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span> had been saved and
+the risings in the provinces put down. There were, however, two parties
+who took the literature of the century in earnest; they thought that the
+hour had struck for translating, one of them, the sentimentalism of
+Rousseau, the other of them, the rationality of Voltaire and Diderot,
+into terms of politics that should form the basis of a new social life.
+The strife between the faction of Robespierre and the faction of
+Chaumette was the reproduction, under the shadow of the guillotine, of
+the great literary strife of a quarter of a century before between Jean
+Jacques and the writers whom he contemptuously styled Holbachians. The
+battle of the books had become a battle between bands of infuriated men.
+The struggle between H&eacute;bert and Chaumette and the Common Council of
+Paris on the one part, and the Committee and Robespierre on the other,
+was the concrete form of the deepest controversy that lies before modern
+society. Can the social union subsist without a belief in God? Chaumette
+answered Yes, and Robespierre cried No. Robespierre followed Rousseau in
+thinking that any one who should refuse to recognise the existence of a
+God, should be exiled as a monster devoid of the faculties of virtue and
+sociability. Chaumette followed Diderot, and Diderot told Samuel Romilly
+in 1783 that belief in God, as well as submission to kings, would be at
+an end all over the world in a very few years. The H&eacute;bertists might have
+taken for their motto Diderot's shocking couplet, if they could have
+known it, about using<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class='center'>
+Les entrailles du pr&ecirc;tre<br />
+Au d&eacute;faut d'un cordon pour &eacute;trangler les rois.<br />
+</p>
+
+<p>The theists and the atheists, Chaumette and Robespierre, each of them
+accepted the doctrine that it was in the power of the armed legislator
+to impose any belief and any rites he pleased upon the country at his
+feet. The theism or the atheism of the new France depended, as they
+thought, on the issue of the war for authority between the H&eacute;bertists in
+the Common Council of Paris, and the Committee of Public Safety. That
+was the religious side of the attitude of the government to the
+opposition, and it is the side that possesses most historic interest.
+Billaud cared very little for religion in any way; his quarrel with the
+Commune and with H&eacute;bert was political. What Robespierre's drift appears
+to have been, was to use the political animosity of the Committee as a
+means of striking foes, against whom his own animosity was not only
+political but religious also.</p>
+
+<p>It would doubtless show a very dull apprehension of the violence and
+confusion of the time, to suppose that even Robespierre, with all his
+love for concise theories, was accustomed to state his aim to himself
+with the definite neatness in which it appears when reduced to literary
+statement. Pedant as he was, he was yet enough of a politician to see
+the practical urgency of restoring material order, whatever spiritual
+belief or disbelief might accompany it. The prospect of a rallying point
+for material order was incessantly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span> changing; and Robespierre turned to
+different quarters in search of it almost from week to week. He was only
+able to exert a certain limited authority over his colleagues in the
+government, by virtue of his influence over the various sections of
+possible opposition, and this was a moral, and not an official,
+influence. It was acquired not by marked practical gifts, for in truth
+Robespierre did not possess them, but by his good character, by his
+rhetoric, and by the skill with which he kept himself prominently before
+the public eye. The effective seat of his power, notwithstanding many
+limits and incessant variations, was the Jacobin Club. There a speech
+from him threw his listeners into ecstasies, that have been
+disrespectfully compared to the paroxysms of Jansenist convulsionaries,
+or the hysterics of Methodist negroes on a cotton plantation. We
+naturally think of those grave men who a few years before had founded
+the republic in America. Jefferson served with Washington in the
+Virginian legislature and with Franklin in Congress, and he afterwards
+said that he never heard either of them speak ten minutes at a time;
+while John Adams declared that he never heard Jefferson utter three
+sentences together. Of Robespierre it is stated on good authority that
+for eighteen months there was not a single evening on which he did not
+make to the assembled Jacobins at least one speech, and that never a
+short one.</p>
+
+<p>Strange as it may seem, Robespierre's credit with this grim assembly was
+due to his truly Philistine<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span> respectability and to his literary faculty.
+He figured as the philosopher and bookman of the party: the most
+iconoclastic politicians are usually willing to respect the scholar,
+provided they are sure of his being on their side. Robespierre had from
+the first discountenanced the fantastic caprices of some too excitable
+allies. He distrusted the noisy patriots of the middle class, who
+curried favour with the crowd by clothing themselves in coarse garments,
+clutching a pike, and donning the famous cap of red woollen, which had
+been the emblem of the emancipation of a slave in ancient Rome. One
+night at the Jacobin Club, Robespierre mounted the tribune, dressed with
+his usual elaborate neatness, and still wearing powder in his hair. An
+onlooker unceremoniously planted on the orator's head the red cap
+demanded by revolutionary etiquette. Robespierre threw the sacred symbol
+on the ground with a severe air, and then proceeded with a discourse of
+much austerity. Not that he was averse to a certain seemly decoration,
+or to the embodiment of revolutionary sentiment by means of a symbolism
+that strikes our cooler imagination as rather puerile. He was as ready
+as others to use the arts of the theatre for the liturgy of patriots.
+One of the most touching of all the minor dramatic incidents of the
+Revolution was the death of Barra. This was a child of thirteen who
+enrolled himself as a drummer, and marched with the Blues to suppress
+the rebel Whites in La Vend&eacute;e. One day he advanced too close to the
+enemy's post, intrepidly beating the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span> charge. He was surrounded, but the
+peasant soldiers were loth to strike, 'Cry <i>Long live the King!</i>' they
+shouted, 'or else death!' 'Long live the Republic!' was the poor little
+hero's answer, as a ball pierced his heart. Robespierre described the
+incident to the Convention, and amid prodigious enthusiasm demanded that
+the body of the young martyr of liberty should be transported to the
+Pantheon with special pomp, and that David, the artist of the
+Revolution, should be charged with the duty of devising and embellishing
+the festival. As it happened, the arrangements were made for the
+ceremony to take place on the Tenth of Thermidor&mdash;a day on which
+Robespierre and all Paris were concerned about a celebration of bloodier
+import. Thermidor, however, was still far off; and the red sun of
+Jacobin enthusiasm seemed as if it would shine unclouded for ever.</p>
+
+<p>Even at the Jacobins, however, popular as he was, Robespierre felt every
+instant the necessity of walking cautiously. He was as far removed as
+possible from that position of Dictator which some historians with a
+wearisome iteration persist in ascribing to him, even at the moment when
+they are enumerating the defeats which the party of H&eacute;bert was able to
+inflict upon him in the very bosom of the Mother Club itself. They make
+him the sanguinary dictator in one sentence, and the humiliated
+intriguer in the next. The latter is much the more correct account of
+the two, if we choose to call a man an intriguer who was honestly
+anxious to suppress what he considered a wicked<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span> faction, and yet had
+need of some dexterity to keep his own head upon his shoulders.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>In the winter of 1793 the Municipal party, guided by H&eacute;bert and
+Chaumette, made their memorable attempt to extirpate Christianity in
+France. The doctrine of D'Holbach's supper-table had for a short space
+the arm of flesh and the sword of the temporal power on its side. It was
+the first appearance of dogmatic atheism in Europe as a political force.
+This makes it one of the most remarkable moments in the Revolution, just
+as it makes the Revolution itself the most remarkable moment in modern
+history. The first political demonstration of atheism was attended by
+some of the excesses, the folly, the extravagances that stained the
+growth of Christianity. On the whole it is a very mild story compared
+with the atrocities of the Jewish records or the crimes of Catholicism.
+The worst charge against the party of Chaumette is that they were
+intolerant, and the charge is deplorably true; but this charge cannot
+lie in the mouth of persecuting churches.</p>
+
+<p>Historical recriminations, however, are not very edifying. It is
+perfectly fair when Catholics talk of the atheist Terror, to rejoin that
+the retainers of Anjou and Montpensier slew more men and women on the
+first day of the Saint Bartholomew than perished in Paris through the
+Years I. and II. But the retort does us no good beyond the region of
+dialectic; it rather brings us down to the level of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span> poor sectaries
+whom it crushes. Let us raise ourselves into clearer air. The fault of
+the atheist is that they knew no better than to borrow the maxims of the
+churchmen; and even those who agree with the dogmatic denials of the
+atheists&mdash;if such there be&mdash;ought yet to admit that the mere change from
+superstition to reason is a small gain, if the conclusions of reason are
+still to be enforced by the instruments of superstition. Our opinions
+are less important than the spirit and temper with which they possess
+us, and even good opinions are worth very little unless we hold them in
+a broad, intelligent, and spacious way. Now some of the opinions of
+Chaumette were full of enlightenment and hope. He had a generous and
+vivid faith in humanity, and he showed the natural effect of abandoning
+belief in another life by his energetic interest in arrangements for
+improving the lot of man in this life. But it would be far better to
+share the superstitious opinions of a virtuous and benignant priest like
+the Bishop in Victor Hugo's <i>Mis&eacute;rables</i>, than to hold those good
+opinions of Chaumette as he held them, with a rancorous intolerance, a
+reckless disregard of the rights and feelings of others, and a shallow
+forgetfulness of all that great and precious part of our natures that
+lies out of the immediate domain of the logical understanding. One can
+understand how an honest man would abhor the darkness and tyranny of the
+Church. But then to borrow the same absolutism in the interests of new
+light, was inevitably to bring the new light into the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span> same abhorrence
+as had befallen the old system of darkness. And this is exactly what
+happened. In every family where a mother sought to have her child
+baptized, or where sons and daughters sought to have the dying spirit of
+the old consoled by the last sacrament, there sprang up a bitter enemy
+to the government which had closed the churches and proscribed the
+priests.</p>
+
+<p>How could a society whose spiritual life had been nourished in the
+solemn mysticism of the Middle Ages, suddenly turn to embrace a gaudy
+paganism? The common self-respect of humanity was outraged by apostate
+priests who, whether under the pressure of fear of Chaumette, or in a
+very superfluity of folly and ecstasy of degradation, hastened to
+proclaim the charlatanry of their past lives, as they filed before the
+Convention, led by the Archbishop of Paris, and accompanied by rude
+acolytes bearing piles of the robes and the vessels of silver and gold
+with which they had once served their holy offices. 'Our enemies,'
+Voltaire had said, 'have always on their side the fat of the land, the
+sword, the strong box, and the <i>canaille</i>.' For a moment all these
+forces were on the other side, and it is deplorable to think that they
+were as much abused by their new masters as by the old. The explanation
+is that the destructive party had been brought up in the schools of the
+ecclesiastical party, and their work was a mere outbreak of mutiny, not
+a grave and responsible attempt to lead France to a worthier faith. If,
+as Chaumette<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span> believed, mankind are the only Providence of men, surely
+in that faith more than in any other are we bound to be very solicitous
+not to bring the violent hand of power on any of the spiritual
+acquisitions of the race, and very patient in dealing with the slowness
+of the common people to leave their outworn creeds.</p>
+
+<p>Instead of defying the Church by the theatrical march of the Goddess of
+Reason under the great sombre arches of the Cathedral of Our Lady,
+Chaumette should have found comfort in a firm calculation of the
+conditions. 'You,' he might have said to the priests,&mdash;'you have so
+debilitated the minds of men and women by your promises and your dreams,
+that many a generation must come and go before Europe can throw off the
+yoke of your superstition. But we promise you that they shall be
+generations of strenuous battle. We give you all the advantages that you
+can get from the sincerity and pious worth of the good and simple among
+you. We give you all that the bad among you may get by resort to the
+poisoned weapons of your profession and its traditions,&mdash;its bribes to
+mental indolence, its hypocritical affectations in the pulpit, its
+tyranny in the closet, its false speciousness in the world, its menace
+at the deathbed. With all these you may do your worst, and still
+humanity will escape you; still the conscience of the race will rise
+away from you; still the growth of brighter ideals and a nobler purpose
+will go on, leaving ever further and further behind them your dwarfed
+finality and leaden moveless<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span> stereotype. We shall pass you by on your
+flank; your fieriest darts will only spend themselves on air. We will
+not attack you as Voltaire did; we will not exterminate you; we shall
+explain you. History will place your dogma in its class, above or below
+a hundred competing dogmas, exactly as the naturalist classifies his
+species. From being a conviction, it will sink to a curiosity; from
+being the guide to millions of human lives, it will dwindle down to a
+chapter in a book. As History explains your dogma, so Science will dry
+it up; the conception of law will silently make the conception of the
+daily miracle of your altars seem impossible; the mental climate will
+gradually deprive your symbols of their nourishment, and men will turn
+their backs on your system, not because they have confuted it, but
+because, like witchcraft or astrology, it has ceased to interest them.
+The great ship of your Church, once so stout and fair and well laden
+with good destinies, is become a skeleton ship; it is a phantom hulk,
+with warped planks and sere canvas, and you who work it are no more than
+ghosts of dead men, and at the hour when you seem to have reached the
+bay, down your ship will sink like lead or like stone to the deepest
+bottom.'</p>
+
+<p>Alas, the speculation of the century had not rightly attuned men's minds
+to this firm confidence in the virtue of liberty, sounding like a bell
+through all distractions. None of these high things were said. The
+temples were closed, the sacred symbols defiled, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span> priests
+maltreated, the worshippers dispersed. The Commune of Paris imitated the
+policy of the King of France who revoked the Edict of Nantes, and
+democratic atheism parodied the dragonnades of absolutist Catholicism.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Robespierre was unutterably outraged by the proceedings of the atheists.
+They perplexed him as a politician intent upon order, and they afflicted
+him sorely as an ardent disciple of the Savoyard Vicar. H&eacute;bert, however,
+was so strong that it needed some courage to attack him, nor did
+Robespierre dare to withstand him to the face. But he did not flinch
+from making an energetic assault upon atheism and the excesses of its
+partisans. His admirers usually count his speech of the Twenty-first of
+November one of the most admirable of his oratorical successes. The
+Sphinx still sits inexorable at our gates, and his words have lost none
+of their interest. 'Every philosopher and every individual,' he said,
+'may adopt whatever opinion he pleases about atheism. Any one who wishes
+to make such an opinion into a crime is an insensate; but the public man
+or the legislator who should adopt such a system, would be a hundred
+times more insensate still. The National Convention abhors it. The
+Convention is not the author of a scheme of metaphysics. It was not to
+no purpose that it published the Declaration of the Rights of Man in
+presence of the Supreme Being. I shall be told perhaps that I have a
+narrow intelligence, that I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span> am a man of prejudice, and a fanatic. I
+have already said that I spoke neither as an individual nor as a
+philosopher with a system, but as a representative of the people.
+<i>Atheism is aristocratic. The idea of a great being who watches over
+oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is essentially the
+idea of the people.</i> This is the sentiment of Europe and the Universe;
+it is the sentiment of the French nation. That people is attached
+neither to priests, nor to superstition, nor to ceremonies; it is
+attached only to worship in itself, or in other words to the idea of an
+incomprehensible Power, the terror of wrongdoers, the stay and comfort
+of virtue, to which it delights to render words of homage that are all
+so many anathemas against injustice and triumphant crime.'</p>
+
+<p>This is Robespierre's favourite attitude, the priest posing as
+statesman. Like others, he declares the Supreme Power incomprehensible,
+and then describes him in terms of familiar comprehension. He first
+declares atheism an open choice, and then he brands it with the most
+odious epithet in the accepted vocabulary of the hour. Danton followed
+practically the same line, though saying much less about it. 'If
+Greece,' he said in the Convention, 'had its Olympian games, France too
+shall solemnise her sans-culottid days. The people will have high
+festivals; they will offer incense to the Supreme Being, to the master
+of nature; for we never intended to annihilate the reign of superstition
+in order to set up the reign of atheism.... If we have not honoured the
+priest of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span> error and fanaticism, neither do we wish to honour the priest
+of incredulity: we wish to serve the people. I demand that there shall
+be an end of these anti-religious masquerades in the Convention.'</p>
+
+<p>There was an end of the masquerading, but the H&eacute;bertists still kept
+their ground. Danton, Robespierre, and the Committee were all equally
+impotent against them for some months longer. The revolutionary force
+had been too strong to be resisted by any government since the Paris
+insurgents had carried both King and Assembly in triumph from Versailles
+in the October of 1789. It was now too strong for those who had begun to
+strive with all their might to build a new government out of the
+agencies that had shattered the old to pieces. For some months the
+battle which had been opened by Robespierre's remonstrance against
+atheistic intolerance, degenerated into a series of masked skirmishes.
+The battle-ground of rival principles was overshadowed by the baleful
+wings of the genius of demonic Hate. <i>Vexilla regis prodeunt inferni</i>;
+the banners of the King of the Pit came forth. The scene at the
+Cordeliers for a time became as frantic as a Council of the Early Church
+settling the true composition of the Holy Trinity. Or it recalls the
+fierce and bloody contentions between Demos and Oligarchy in an old
+Greek town. We think of the day in the harbour of Corcyra when the
+Athenian admiral who had come to deliver the people, sailed out to meet
+the Spartan enemy, and on turning round to see if his Corcyrean allies
+were following,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span> saw them following indeed, but the crew of every ship
+striving in enraged conflict with one another. Collot D'Herbois had come
+back in hot haste from Lyons, where, along with Fouch&eacute;, he had done his
+best to carry out the decree of the Convention, that not one stone of
+the city should be left on the top of another, and that even its very
+name should cease from the lips of men. Carrier was recalled from
+Nantes, where his feats of ingenious massacre had rivalled the exploits
+of the cruellest and maddest of the Roman Emperors. The presence of
+these men of blood gave new courage and resolution to the H&eacute;bertists.
+Though the alliance was informal, yet as against Danton, Camille
+Desmoulins, and the rest of the Indulgents, as well as against
+Robespierre, they made common cause.</p>
+
+<p>Camille Desmoulins attacked H&eacute;bert in successive numbers of a journal
+that is perhaps the one truly literary monument of this stage of the
+revolution. H&eacute;bert retaliated by impugning the patriotism of Desmoulins
+in the Club, and the unfortunate wit, notwithstanding the efforts of
+Robespierre on his behalf, was for a while turned out of the sacred
+precincts. The power of the extreme faction was shown in relation to
+other prominent members of the party whom they loved to stigmatise by
+the deadly names of Indulgent and Moderantist. Even Danton himself was
+attacked (December 1793), and the integrity of his patriotism brought
+into question. Robespierre made an energetic defence of his great rival
+in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span> hierarchy of revolution, and the defence saved Danton from the
+mortal ignominy of expulsion from the communion of the orthodox. On the
+other hand, Anacharsis Clootz, that guileless ally of the party of
+delirium, was less fortunate. Robespierre assailed the cosmopolitan for
+being a German baron, for having four thousand pounds a year, and for
+striking his sans-culottism some notes higher than the regular pitch.
+Even M. Louis Blanc calls this an iniquity, and sets it down as the
+worst page in Robespierre's life. Others have described Robespierre as
+struck at this time by the dire malady of kings&mdash;hatred of the Idea. It
+seems, however, a hard saying that devotion to the Idea is to extinguish
+common sense. Clootz, notwithstanding his simple and disinterested
+character, and his possession of some rays of the modern illumination,
+was one of the least sane of all the men who in the exultation of their
+silly gladness were suddenly caught up by that great wheel of fire. All
+we can say is that Robespierre's bitter demeanour towards Clootz was
+ungenerous; but then this is only natural in him. Robespierre often
+clothed cool policy in the semblance of clemency, but I cannot hear in
+any phrase he ever used, or see in any measure he ever proposed, the
+mark of true generosity; of kingliness of spirit, not a trace. He had no
+element of ready and cordial propitiation, an element that can never be
+wanting in the greatest leaders in time of storm. If he resisted the
+atrocious proposals to put Madame Elizabeth to death, he was thinking
+not of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span> mercy or justice, but of the mischievous effect that her
+execution would have upon the public opinion of Europe, and he was so
+unmanly as to speak of her as <i>la m&eacute;prisable s&oelig;ur de Louis XVI</i>. Such
+a phrase is the disclosure of an abject stratum in his soul.</p>
+
+<p>Yet this did not prevent him from seeing and denouncing the bloody
+extravagances of the Proconsuls, the representatives of Parisian
+authority in the provinces; nor from standing firm against the execution
+of the Seventy-Three, who had been bold enough to question the purgation
+of the National Convention on the Thirty-first of May. But the return of
+Collot d'Herbois made the situation more intricate. Collot was by his
+position the ally of Billaud, and to attack him, therefore, was to
+attack the most powerful member of the Committee of Public Safety.
+Billaud was too formidable. He was always the impersonation of the ruder
+genius of the Revolution, and the incarnation of the philosophy of the
+Terror, not as a delirium, but as a piece of deliberate policy. His
+pale, sober, and concentrated physiognomy seemed a perpetual menace. He
+had no gifts of speech, but his silence made people shudder, like the
+silence of the thunder when the tempest rages at its height. It was said
+by contemporaries that if Vadier was a hy&aelig;na, Bar&egrave;re a jackal, and
+Robespierre a cat, Billaud was a tiger.</p>
+
+<p>The cat perceived that he was in danger of not having the tiger, jackal,
+and hy&aelig;na, on his side. Robespierre, in whom spasmodical courage and
+timid<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span>ity ruled by rapid turns, began to suspect that he had been
+premature; and a convenient illness, which some suppose to have been
+feigned, excused his withdrawal for some weeks from a scene where he
+felt that he could no longer see clear. We cannot doubt that both he and
+Danton were perfectly assured that the anarchic party must unavoidably
+roll headlong into the abyss. But the hour of doom was uncertain. To
+make a mistake in the right moment, to hurry the crisis, was instant
+death. Robespierre was a more adroit calculator than Danton. We must not
+confound his thin and querulous reserve with that stout and deep-browed
+patience, which may imply as superb a fortitude, and may demand as much
+iron control in a statesman, as the most heroic exploits of political
+energy. But his habit of waiting on force, instead of, like the other,
+taking the initiative with force, had trained his sight. The mixture of
+astuteness with his scruple, of egoistic policy with his stiffness for
+doctrine, gave him an advantage over Danton, that made his life worth
+exactly three months' more purchase than Danton's. It has been said that
+Spinozism or Transcendentalism in poetic production becomes
+Machiavellism in reflection: for the same reasons we may always expect
+sentimentalism in theory to become under the pressure of action a very
+self-protecting guile. Robespierre's mind was not rich nor flexible
+enough for true statesmanship, and it is a grave mistake to suppose that
+the various cunning tacks in which his career abounds, were any<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span> sign of
+genuine versatility or resource or political growth and expansion. They
+were, in fact, the resort of a man whose nerves were weaker than his
+volition. Robespierre was a kind of spinster. Force of head did not
+match his spiritual ambition. He was not, we repeat, a coward in any
+common sense; in that case he would have remained quiet among the
+croaking frogs of the Marsh, and by and by have come to hold a portfolio
+under the first Consul. He did not fear death, and he envied with
+consuming envy those to whom nature had given the qualities of
+initiative. But his nerves always played him false. The consciousness of
+having to resolve to take a decided step alone, was the precursor of a
+fit of trembling. His heart did not fail, but he could not control the
+parched voice, nor the twitching features, not the ghastly palsy of
+inner misgiving. In this respect Robespierre recalls a more illustrious
+man; we think of Cicero tremblingly calling upon the Senate to decide
+for him whether he should order the execution of the Catilinarian
+conspirators. It is to be said, however, in his favour that he had the
+art, which Cicero lacked, to hide his pusillanimity. Robespierre knew
+himself, and did his best to keep his own secret.</p>
+
+<p>His absence during the final crisis of the anarchic party allowed events
+to ripen, without committing him to that initiative in dangerous action
+which he had dreaded on the Tenth of August, as he dreaded it on every
+other decisive day of this burning time.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span> The party of the Commune
+became more and more daring in their invectives against the Convention
+and the Committees. At length they proclaimed open insurrection. But
+Paris was cold, and opinion was divided. In the night of the Thirteenth
+of March, H&eacute;bert, Chaumette, Clootz, were arrested. The next day
+Robespierre recovered sufficiently to appear at the Jacobin Club. He
+joined his colleagues of the Committee of Public Safety in striking the
+blow. On the Twenty-fourth of March the Ultra-Revolutionist leaders were
+beheaded.</p>
+
+<p>The first bloody breach in the Jacobin ranks was speedily followed by
+the second. The Right wing of the opposition to the Committee soon
+followed the Left down the ways to dusty death, and the execution of the
+Anarchists only preceded by a week the arrest of the Moderates. When the
+seizure of Danton had once before been discussed in the Committee,
+Robespierre resisted the proposal violently. We have already seen how he
+defended Danton at the Jacobin Club, when the Club underwent the process
+of purification in the winter. What produced this sudden tack? How came
+Robespierre to assent in March to a violence which he had angrily
+discountenanced in February? There had been no change in the policy or
+attitude of Danton himself. The military operations against the domestic
+and foreign enemies were no sooner fairly in the way of success, than
+Danton began to meditate in serious earnest the consolidation of a
+republican system of law and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span> justice. He would fain have stayed the
+Terror. 'Let us leave something,' he said, 'to the guillotine of
+opinion.' He aided, no doubt, in the formation of the Revolutionary
+Tribunal, but this was exactly in harmony with his usual policy of
+controlling popular violence without alienating the strength of popular
+sympathy. The process of the tribunal was rough and summary, but it was
+fairer&mdash;until Robespierre's Law of Prairial&mdash;than people usually
+suppose, and it was the very temple of the goddess of Justice herself
+compared with the September massacres. 'Let us prove ourselves
+terrible,' Danton said, 'to relieve the people from the necessity of
+being so.' His activity had been incessant in urging and superintending
+the great levies against the foreigner; he had gone repeatedly on
+distant and harassing expeditions, as the representative of the
+Convention at the camps on the frontier. In the midst of all this he
+found time to press forward measures for the instruction of the young,
+and for the due appointment of judges, and his head was full of ideas
+for the construction of a permanent executive council. It was this which
+made him eager for a cessation of the method of Terror, and it was this
+which made the Committee of Public Safety his implacable enemy.</p>
+
+<p>Why, then, did Robespierre, who also passed as a man of order and
+humanity, not continue to support Danton after the suppression of the
+H&eacute;bertists, as he had supported him before? The common and facile answer
+is that he was moved by a malignant desire<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span> to put a rival out of the
+way. On the whole, the evidence seems to support Napoleon's opinion that
+Robespierre was incapable of voting for the death of anybody in the
+world on grounds of personal enmity. And his acquiescence in the ruin of
+Danton is intelligible enough on the grounds of selfish policy. The
+Committee hated Danton for the good reason that he had openly attacked
+them, and his cry for clemency was an inflammatory and dangerous protest
+against their system. Now Robespierre, rightly or wrongly, had made up
+his mind that the Committee was the instrument by which, and which only,
+he could work out his own vague schemes of power and reconstruction.
+And, in any case, how could he resist the Committee? The famous
+insurrectionary force of Paris, which Danton had been the first to
+organise against a government, had just been chilled by the fall of the
+H&eacute;bertists. Least of all could this force be relied upon to rise in
+defence of the very chief whose every word for many weeks past had been
+a protest against the Communal leaders. In separating himself from the
+Ultras, Danton had cut off the great reservoir of his peculiar strength.</p>
+
+<p>It may be said that the Convention was the proper centre of resistance
+to the designs of the Committee, and that if Danton and Robespierre had
+united their forces in the Convention they would have defeated Billaud
+and his allies. This seems to us more than doubtful. The Committee had
+acquired an immense preponderance over the Convention. They had been<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>
+eminently successful in the immense tasks imposed upon them. They had
+the prestige not only of being the government&mdash;so great a thing in a
+country that had just emerged from the condition of a centralised
+monarchy; they had also the prestige of being a government that had done
+its work triumphantly. We are now in March. In July we shall find that
+Robespierre adopted the very policy that we are now discussing, of
+playing off the Convention against the Committee. In July that policy
+ended in his headlong fall. Why should it have been any more successful
+four months earlier?</p>
+
+<p>What we may say is, that Robespierre was bound in all morality to defend
+Danton in the Convention at every hazard. Possibly so; but then to run
+risks for chivalry's sake was not in Robespierre's nature, and no man
+can climb out beyond the limitations of his own character. His narrow
+head and thin blood and instable nerve, his calculating humour and his
+frigid egoism, disinclined him to all games of chance. His apologists
+have sought to put a more respectable colour on his abandonment of
+Danton. The precisian, they say, disapproved of Danton's lax and
+heedless courses. Danton said to him one day:&mdash;'What do I care? Public
+opinion is a strumpet, and posterity a piece of nonsense.' How should
+the puritanical lawyer endure such cynicism as this? And Danton
+delighted in inflicting these coarse shocks. Again, Danton had given
+various gross names of contempt to Saint Just. Was Robespierre not to
+feel insults<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span> offered to the ablest and most devoted of his lieutenants?
+What was more important than all, the acclamations with which the
+partisans of reaction greeted the fall of the Ultras, made it necessary
+to give instant and unmistakable notice to the foes of the Revolution
+that the goddess of the scorching eye and fiery hand still grasped the
+axe of her vengeance.</p>
+
+<p>These are pleas invented after the fact. All goes to show that
+Robespierre was really moved by nothing more than his invariable dread
+of being left behind, of finding himself on the weaker side, of not
+seeming practical and political enough. And having made up his mind that
+the stronger party was bent on the destruction of the Dantonists, he
+became fiercer than Billaud himself. It is constantly seen that the
+waverer, of nervous atrabiliar constitution, no sooner overcomes the
+agony of irresolution, than he flings himself on his object with a
+vindictive tenacity that seems to repay him for all the moral
+humiliation inflicted on him by his stifled doubts. He redeems the
+slowness of his approach by the fury of his spring. 'Robespierre,' says
+M. d'H&eacute;ricault, 'precipitated himself to the front of the opinion that
+was yelling against his friends of yesterday. In order to keep his usual
+post in the van of the Revolution, in order to secure the advantage to
+his own popularity of an execution which the public voice seemed to
+demand, he came forward as the author of that execution, though only the
+day before he had hesitated about its utility, and though it was, in
+truth far less use<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>ful to him than it proved to be to his future
+antagonists.'</p>
+
+<p>Robespierre first alarmed Danton's friends by assuming a certain icy
+coldness of manner, and by some menacing phrases about the faction of
+the so-called Moderates. Danton had gone, as he often did, to his native
+village of Arcis-sur-Aube, to seek repose and a little clearness of
+sight in the night that wrapped him about. He was devoid of personal
+ambition; he never had any humour for mere factious struggles. His,
+again, was the temperament of violent force, and in such types the
+reaction is always tremendous. The indomitable activity of the last
+twenty months had bred weariness of spirit. The nemesis of a career of
+strenuous Will in large natures is apt to be a sudden sense of the irony
+of things. In Danton, as with Byron it happened afterwards, the
+vehemence of the revolutionary spirit was touched by this desolating
+irony. His friends tried to rouse him. It is not clear that he could
+have done anything. The balance of force, after the suppression of the
+H&eacute;bertists, was irretrievably against him, as calculation had already
+revealed to Robespierre.</p>
+
+<p>There are various stories of the pair having met at dinner almost on the
+eve of Danton's arrest, and parting with sombre disquietude on both
+sides. The interview, with its champagne, its interlocutors, its play of
+sinister repartee, may possibly have taken place, but the alleged
+details are plainly apocryphal. After all, 'Religion ist in der Thiere
+Trieb,' says<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span> Wallenstein; 'the very savage drinks not with the victim,
+into whose breast he means to plunge a sword.' Danton was warned that
+Robespierre was plotting his arrest. 'If I thought he had the bare
+idea,' said Danton with something of Gargantuan hyperbole, 'I would eat
+his bowels out.' Such was the disdain with which the 'giant of the
+mighty bone and bold emprise' thought of our meagre-hearted pedant. The
+truth is that in the stormy and distracted times of politics, and
+perhaps in all times, contempt is a dangerous luxury. A man may be a
+very poor creature, and still have a faculty for mischief. And
+Robespierre had this faculty in the case of Danton. With singular
+baseness, he handed over to Saint Just a collection of notes, to serve
+as material for the indictment which Saint Just was to present to the
+Convention. They comprised everything that suspicion could interpret
+malignantly, from the most conspicuous acts of Danton's public life,
+down to the casual freedom of private discourse.</p>
+
+<p>Another infamy was to follow. After the arrest, and on the proceedings
+to obtain the assent of the Convention to the trial of Danton and others
+of its members, one only of their friends had the courage to rise and
+demand that they should be heard at the bar. Robespierre burst out in
+cold rage; he asked whether they had undergone so many heroic
+sacrifices, counting among them these acts of 'painful severity,' only
+to fall under the yoke of a band of domineering intriguers; and he cried
+out impatiently that they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span> would brook no claim of privilege, and suffer
+no rotten idol. The word was felicitously chosen, for the Convention
+dreaded to have its independence suspected, and it dreaded this all the
+more because at this time its independence did not really exist. The
+vote against Danton was unanimous, and the fact that it was so is the
+deepest stain on the fame of this assembly. On the afternoon of the
+Sixteenth Germinal (April 5, 1794) Paris in amazement and some
+stupefaction saw the once-dreaded Titan of the Mountain fast bound in
+the tumbril, and faring towards the sharp-clanging knife. 'I leave it
+all in a frightful welter,' Danton is reported to have said. 'Not a man
+of them has an idea of government. Robespierre will follow me; he is
+dragged down by me. Ah, better be a poor fisherman than meddle with the
+governing of men!'</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Let us pause for a moment over a calmer reminiscence. This was the very
+day on which the virtuous and high-minded Condorcet quitted the friendly
+roof that for nine months had concealed him from the search of
+proscription. The same week he was found dead in his prison. While
+Danton was storming with impotent thunder before the tribunal, Condorcet
+was writing those closing words of his Sketch of Human Progress, which
+are always so full of strength and edification. 'How this picture of the
+human race freed from all its fetters,&mdash;withdrawn from the empire of
+chance, as from that of the enemies<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span> of progress, and walking with firm
+and assured step in the way of truth, of virtue, and happiness, presents
+to the philosopher a sight that consoles him for the errors, the crimes,
+the injustice, with which the earth is yet stained, and of which he is
+not seldom the victim! It is in the contemplation of this picture that
+he receives the reward of his efforts for the progress of reason, for
+the defence of liberty. He ventures to link them with the eternal chain
+of the destinies of man: it is there he finds the true recompense of
+virtue, the pleasure of having done a lasting good; fate can no longer
+undo it, by any disastrous compensation that shall restore prejudice and
+bondage. This contemplation is for him a refuge, into which the
+recollection of his persecutors can never follow him; in which, living
+in thought with man reinstated in the rights and the dignity of his
+nature, he forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed, by base fear,
+by envy: it is here that he truly abides with his fellows, in an elysium
+that his reason has known how to create for itself, and that his love
+for humanity adorns with all purest delights.'</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>In following the turns of the drama which was to end in the tragedy of
+Thermidor, we perceive that after the fall of the anarchists and the
+death of Danton, the relations between Robespierre and the Committees
+underwent a change. He, who had hitherto been on the side of government,
+became in turn an agency of opposition. He did this in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span> interest of
+ultimate stability, but the difference between the new position and the
+old is that he now distinctly associated the idea of a stable republic
+with the ascendency of his own religious conceptions. How far the
+ascendency of his own personality was involved, we have no means of
+judging. The vulgar accusation against him is that he now deliberately
+aimed at a dictatorship, and began to plot with that end in view. It is
+always the most difficult thing in the world to draw a line between mere
+arrogant egoism on the one hand, and on the other the identification of
+a man's personal elevation with the success of his public cause. The two
+ends probably become mixed in his mind, and if the cause be a good one,
+it is the height of pharisaical folly to quarrel with him, because he
+desires that his authority and renown shall receive some of the lustre
+of a far-shining triumph. What we complain of in Napoleon Bonaparte, for
+instance, is not that he sought power, but that he sought it in the
+interests of a coarse, brutal, and essentially unmeaning personal
+ambition. And so of Robespierre. We need not discuss the charge that he
+sought to make himself master. The important thing is that his mastery
+could have served no great end for France; that it would have been like
+himself, poor, barren, and hopelessly mediocre. And this would have been
+seen on every side. France had important military tasks to perform
+before her independence was assured. Robespierre hated war, and was
+jealous of every victory. France was in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span> urgent need of stable
+government, of new laws, of ordered institutions. Robespierre never said
+a word to indicate that he had a single positive idea in his head on any
+of these great departments. And, more than this, he was incapable of
+making use of men who were more happily endowed than himself. He had
+never mastered that excellent observation of De Retz, that of all the
+qualities of a good party chief, none is so indispensable as being able
+to suppress on many occasions, and to hide on all, even legitimate
+suspicions. He was corroded by suspicion, and this paralyses able
+servants. Finally, Robespierre had no imperial quality of soul, but only
+that very sorry imitation of it, a lively irritability.</p>
+
+<p>The base of Robespierre's schemes of social reconstruction now came
+clearly into view; and what a base! An official Supreme Being, and a
+regulated Terror. The one was to fill up the spiritual void, and the
+other to satisfy all the exigencies of temporal things. It is to the
+credit of Robespierre's perspicacity that he should have recognised the
+human craving for religion, but this credit is as naught when we
+contemplate the jejune thing that passed for religion in his dim and
+narrow understanding. Rousseau had brought a new soul into the
+eighteenth century by the Savoyard Vicar's Profession of Faith, the most
+fervid and exalted expression of emotional deism that religious
+literature contains; vague, irrational, incoherent, cloudy; but the
+clouds are suffused with glowing gold. When we turn from that to the
+political version of it in Robes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>pierre's discourse on the relations of
+religious and moral ideas with republican principles, we feel as one who
+revisits a landscape that had been made glorious to him by a summer sky
+and fresh liquid winds from the gates of the evening sun, only to find
+it dead under a gray heaven and harsh blasts from the northeast.
+Robespierre's words on the Supreme Being are never a brimming stream of
+deep feeling; they are a literary concoction: never the self-forgetting
+expansion of the religious soul, but only the composite of the
+rhetorician. He thought he had a passion for religion; what he took for
+religion was little more than mental decorum. We do not mean that he was
+insincere, or that he was without a feeling for high things. But here,
+as in all else, his aspiration was far beyond his faculty; he yearned
+for great spiritual emotions, as he had yearned for great thoughts and
+great achievements, but his spiritual capacity was as scanty and obscure
+as his intelligence. And where unkind Nature thus unequally yokes lofty
+objects in a man with a short mental reach, she stamps him with the very
+definition of mediocrity.</p>
+
+<p>How can we speak with decent patience of a man who seriously thought
+that he should conciliate the conservative and theological elements of
+the society at his feet, by such an odious opera-piece as the Feast of
+the Supreme Being? This was designed as a triumphant ripost to the Feast
+of Reason, which Chaumette and his friends had celebrated in the winter.
+The energumens of the Goddess of Reason<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span> had now been some weeks in
+their bloody graves; by this time, if they had given the wrong answer to
+the supreme enigma, their eyes would perhaps be opened. Robespierre
+persuaded the Convention to decree an official recognition of the
+Supreme Being, and to attend a commemorative festival in honour of their
+mystic patron. He contrived to be chosen president for the decade in
+which the festival would fall. When the day came (20th Prairial, June 8,
+1794), he clothed himself with more than even his usual care. As he
+looked out from the windows of the Tuileries upon the jubilant crowd in
+the gardens, he was intoxicated with enthusiasm. 'O Nature,' he cried,
+'how sublime thy power, how full of delight! How tyrants must grow pale
+at the idea of such a festival as this!' In pontifical pride he walked
+at the head of the procession, with flowers and wheat-ears in his hand,
+to the sound of chants and symphonies and choruses of maidens. On the
+first of the great basins in the gardens, David, the artist, had devised
+an allegorical structure for which an inauspicious doom was prepared.
+Atheism, a statue of life size, was throned in the midst of an amiable
+group of human Vices, with Madness by her side, and Wisdom menacing them
+with lofty wrath. Great are the perils of symbolism. Robespierre applied
+a torch to Atheism, but alas, the wind was hostile, or else Atheism and
+Madness were damp. They obstinately resisted the torch, and it was
+hapless Wisdom who took fire. Her face, all blackened by smoke, grinned
+a hideous ghastly grin at her sturdy<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span> rivals. The miscarriage of the
+allegory was an evil omen, and men probably thought how much better the
+churchmen always managed their conjurings and the art of spectacle.
+There was a great car drawn by milk-white oxen; in the front were ranged
+sheaves of golden grain, while at the back shepherds and shepherdesses
+posed with scenic graces. The whole mummery was pagan. It was a bringing
+back of Cerealia and Thesmophoria to earth. It stands as the most
+disgusting and contemptible anachronism in history.</p>
+
+<p>The famous republican Calendar, with its Prairials and Germinals, its
+Ventoses and Pluvioses, was an anachronism of the same kind, though it
+was less despicable in its manifestation. Its philosophic base was just
+as retrograde and out of season as the fooleries of the Feast of the
+Supreme Being. The association of worship and sacredness with the fruits
+of the earth, with the forces of nature, with the power and variety of
+the elements, could only be sincere so long as men really thought of all
+these things as animated each by a special will of its own. Such an
+association became mere charlatanry, when knowledge once passed into the
+positive stage. How could men go back to adore an outer world, after
+they had found out the secret that it is a mere huge group of phenomena,
+following fixed courses, and not obeying spontaneous and unaccountable
+volitions of their own? And what could be more puerile than the fanciful
+connection of the Supreme Being with a pastoral simplicity of life? This
+simplicity was gone, irrecoverably gone, with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span> the passage from nomad
+times to the complexities of a modern society. To typify, therefore, the
+Supreme Being as specially interested in shocks of grain and in
+shepherds and shepherdesses was to make him a mere figure in an idyll,
+the ornament of a rural mask, a god of the garden, instead of the
+sovereign director of the universal forces, and stern master of the
+destinies of men. Chaumette's commemoration of the Divinity of Reason
+was a sensible performance, compared with Robespierre's farcical
+repartee. It was something, as Comte has said, to select for worship
+man's most individual attribute. If they could not contemplate society
+as a whole, it was at least a gain to pay homage to that faculty in the
+human rulers of the world, which had brought the forces of nature&mdash;its
+pluviosity, nivosity, germinality, and vendemiarity&mdash;under the yoke for
+the service of men.</p>
+
+<p>If the philosophy of Robespierre's pageant was so retrograde and false,
+its politics were still more inane. It is a monument of presumptuous
+infatuation that any one should feel so strongly as he did that order
+could only be restored on condition of coming to terms with religious
+use and prejudice, and then that he should dream that his Supreme
+Being&mdash;a mere didactic phrase, the deity of a poet's georgic&mdash;should
+adequately replace that eternal marvel of construction, by means of
+which the great churchmen had wrought dogma and liturgy and priest and
+holy office into every hour and every mood of men's lives. There is no
+binding principle of human association in a creed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span> with this one bald
+article. 'In truth,' as I have said elsewhere of such deism as
+Robespierre's, 'one can scarcely call it a creed. It is mainly a name
+for a particular mood of fine spiritual exaltation; the expression of a
+state of indefinite aspiration and supreme feeling for lofty things. Are
+you going to convert the new barbarians of our western world with this
+fair word of emptiness? Will you sweeten the lives of suffering men, and
+take its heaviness from that droning piteous chronicle of wrong and
+cruelty and despair, which everlastingly saddens the compassionating ear
+like moaning of a midnight sea; will you animate the stout of heart with
+new fire, and the firm of hand with fresh joy of battle, by the thought
+of a being without intelligible attributes, a mere abstract creation of
+metaphysic, whose mercy is not as our mercy, nor his justice as our
+justice, nor his fatherhood as the fatherhood of men? It was not by a
+cold, a cheerless, a radically depraving conception such as this, that
+the church became the refuge of humanity in the dark times of old, but
+by the representation, to men sitting in bondage and confusion, of
+godlike natures moving among them, under figure of the most eternally
+touching of human relations,&mdash;a tender mother ever interceding for them,
+and an elder brother laying down his life that their burdens might be
+loosened.'</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>On the day of the Feast of the Supreme Being, the guillotine was
+concealed in the folds of rich hangings.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span> It was the Twentieth of
+Prairial. Two days later Couthon proposed to the Convention the
+memorable Law of the Twenty-second Prairial. Robespierre was the
+draftsman, and the text of it still remains in his own writing. This
+monstrous law is simply the complete abrogation of all law. Of all laws
+ever passed in the world it is the most nakedly iniquitous. Tyrants have
+often substituted their own will for the ordered procedure of a
+tribunal, but no tyrant before ever went through the atrocious farce of
+deliberately making a tribunal the organised negation of security for
+justice. Couthon laid its theoretic base in a fallacy that must always
+be full of seduction to shallow persons in authority: 'He who would
+subordinate the public safety to the inventions of jurisconsults, to the
+formulas of the Court, is either an imbecile or a scoundrel.' As if
+public safety could mean anything but the safety of the public. The
+author of the Law of Prairial had forgotten the minatory word of the
+sage to whom he had gone on a pilgrimage in the days of his youth. 'All
+becomes legitimate and even virtuous,' Helv&eacute;tius had written, 'on behalf
+of the public safety.' Rousseau inscribed on the margin, 'The public
+safety is nothing, unless individuals enjoy security.' What security was
+possible under the Law of Prairial?</p>
+
+<p>After the probity and good judgment of the tribunal, the two cardinal
+guarantees in state trials are accurate definition, and proof. The
+offence must be capable of precise description, and the proof against<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span>
+an offender must conform to strict rule. The Law of Prairial violently
+infringed all three of these essential conditions of judicial equity.
+First, the number of the jury who had power to convict was reduced.
+Second, treason was made to consist in such vague and infinitely elastic
+kinds of action as inspiring discouragement, misleading opinion,
+depraving manners, corrupting patriots, abusing the principles of the
+Revolution by perfidious applications. Third, proof was to lie in the
+conscience of the jury; there was an end of preliminary inquiry, of
+witnesses in defence, and of counsel for the accused. Any kind of
+testimony was evidence, whether material or moral, verbal or written, if
+it was of a kind 'likely to gain the assent of a man of reasonable
+mind.'</p>
+
+<p>Now what was Robespierre's motive in devising this infernal instrument?
+The theory that he loved judicial murder for its own sake, can only be
+held by the silliest of royalist or clerical partisans. It is like the
+theory of the vulgar kind of Protestantism, that Mary Tudor or Philip of
+Spain had a keen delight in shedding blood. Robespierre, like Mary and
+like Philip, would have been as well pleased if all the world would have
+come round to his mind without the destruction of a single life. The
+true inquisitor is a creature of policy, not a man of blood by taste.
+What, then, was the policy that inspired the Law of Prairial? To us the
+answer seems clear. We know what was the general aim in Robespierre's
+mind at this point in the history of the Revolution. His<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span> brother
+Augustin was then the representative of the Convention with the army of
+Italy, and General Bonaparte was on terms of close intimacy with him.
+Bonaparte said long afterwards, when he was expiating a life of iniquity
+on the rock of Saint Helena, that he saw long letters from Maximilian to
+Augustin Robespierre, all blaming the Conventional Commissioners&mdash;Tallien,
+Fouch&eacute;, Barras, Collot, and the rest&mdash;for the horrors they perpetrated,
+and accusing them of ruining the Revolution by their atrocities. Again,
+there is abundant testimony that Robespierre did his best to induce the
+Committee of Public Safety to bring those odious malefactors to justice.
+The text of the Law itself discloses the same object. The vague phrases of
+depraving manners and applying revolutionary principles perfidiously, were
+exactly calculated to smite the band of violent men whose conduct was to
+Robespierre the scandal of the Revolution. And there was a curious clause
+in the law as originally presented, which deprived the Convention of the
+right of preventing measures against its own members. Robespierre's general
+design in short was to effect a further purgation of the Convention. There
+is no reason to suppose that he deliberately aimed at any more general
+extermination. On the other hand, it is incredible that, as some have
+maintained, he should merely have had in view the equalisation of rich and
+poor before the tribunals, by withdrawing the aid of counsel and testimony
+to civic character from both rich and poor alike.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>If Robespierre's design was what we believe it to have been, the result
+was a ghastly failure. The Committee of Public Safety would not consent
+to apply his law against the men for whom he had specially designed it.
+The frightful weapon which he had forged was seized by the Committee of
+General Security, and Paris was plunged into the fearful days of the
+Great Terror. The number of persons put to death by the Revolutionary
+Tribunal before the Law of Prairial had been comparatively moderate.
+From the creation of the tribunal in April 1793, down to the execution
+of the H&eacute;bertists in March 1794, the number of persons condemned to
+death was 505. From the death of the H&eacute;bertists down to the death of
+Robespierre, the number of the condemned was 2158. One half of the
+entire number of victims, namely, 1356, were guillotined after the Law
+of Prairial. No deadlier instrument was ever invented by the cruelty of
+man. Innocent women no less than innocent men, poor no less than rich,
+those in whom life was almost spent, no less than those in whom its
+pulse was strongest, virtuous no less than vicious, were sent off in
+woe-stricken batches all those summer days. A man was informed against;
+he was seized in his bed at five in the morning; at seven he was taken
+to the Conciergerie; at nine he received information of the charge
+against him; at ten he went into the dock; by two in the afternoon he
+was condemned; by four his head lay in the executioner's basket.</p>
+
+<p>What stamps the system of the Terror at this date<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span> with a wickedness
+that cannot be effaced, is that at no moment was the danger from foreign
+or domestic foe less serious. We may always forgive something to
+well-grounded panic. The proscriptions of an earlier date in Paris were
+not excessively sanguinary, if we remember that the city abounded in
+royalists and other reactionists, who were really dangerous in fomenting
+discouragement and spreading confusion. If there ever is an excuse for
+martial law, and it must be rare, the French government were warranted
+in resorting to it in 1793. Paris in those days was like a city
+beleaguered, and the world does not use very harsh words about the
+commandant of a besieged town who puts to death traitors found within
+his walls. Opinion in England at this very epoch encouraged the Tory
+government to pass a Treason Bill, which introduced as vague a
+definition of treasonable offence as even the Law of Prairial itself.
+Windham did not shrink from declaring in parliament that he and his
+colleagues were determined to exact 'a rigour beyond the law.' And they
+were as good as their word. The Jacobins had no monopoly either of cruel
+law or cruel breach of law in the eighteenth century. Only thirty years
+before, opinion in Pennsylvania had prompted a hideous massacre of
+harmless Indians as a deed acceptable to God, and the grandson of
+William Penn proclaimed a bounty of fifty dollars for the scalp of a
+female Indian, and three times as much for a male. A man would have had
+quite as good a chance of justice from the Revolutionary Tribunal,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span> as
+at the hands of Braxfield, the Scotch judge, who condemned Muir and
+Palmer for sedition in 1793, and who told the government, with a brazen
+front worthy of Carrier or Collot d'Herbois themselves, that, if they
+would only send him prisoners, he would find law for them.</p>
+
+<p>We have no sympathy with the spirit of paradox that has arisen in these
+days, amusing itself by the vindication of bad men. We think that the
+author of the Law of Prairial was a bad man. But it is time that there
+should be an end of the cant which lifts up its hands at the crimes of
+republicans and freethinkers, and shuts its eyes to the crimes of kings
+and churches. Once more, we ought to rise into a higher air; we ought to
+condemn, wherever we find it, whether on the side of our adversaries or
+on our own, all readiness to substitute arbitrary force for the
+processes of ordered justice. There are moments when such a readiness
+may be leniently judged, but Prairial of 1794 was not one of them either
+in France or in England. And what makes the crime of this law more
+odious, is its association with the official proclamation of the State
+worship of a Supreme Being. The scene of Robespierre's holy festival
+becomes as abominable as a catholic Auto-da-f&eacute;, where solemn homage was
+offered to the God of pity and loving-kindness, while flame glowed round
+the limbs of the victims.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Robespierre was inflamed with resentment, not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span> because so many people
+were guillotined every day, but because the objects of his own enmity
+were not among them. He was chagrined at the miscarriage of his scheme;
+but the chagrin had its root in his desire for order, and not in his
+humanity. A good man&mdash;say so imperfectly good a man as Danton&mdash;could not
+have endured life, after enacting such a law, and seeing the ghastly
+work that it was doing. He could hardly have contented himself with
+drawing tears from the company in Madame Duplay's little parlour, by his
+pathetic recitations from Corneille and Racine, or with listening to
+melting notes from the violin of Le Bas. It is commonly said by
+Robespierre's defenders that he withdrew from the Committee of Public
+Safety, as soon as he found out that he was powerless to arrest the
+daily shedding of blood. The older assumption used to be that he left
+Paris, and ceased to be cognisant of the Committee's deliberations. The
+minutes, however, prove that this was not the case. Robespierre signed
+papers nearly every day of Messidor&mdash;(June 19 to July 18) the
+blood-stained month between Prairial and Thermidor&mdash;and was thoroughly
+aware of the doings of the Committee. His partisans have now fallen back
+on the singular theory of what they style moral absence. He was present
+in the flesh, but standing aloof in the spirit. His frowning silence was
+a deadlier rebuke to the slayers and oppressors than secession.
+Unfortunately for this ingenious explanation of the embarrassing fact of
+a merciful man standing silent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span> before merciless doings, there are at
+least two facts that show its absurdity.</p>
+
+<p>First, there is the affair of Catherine Th&eacute;ot. Catherine Th&eacute;ot was a
+crazy old woman of a type that is commoner in protestant than in
+catholic countries. She believed herself to have special gifts in the
+interpretation of the holy writings, and a few other people as crazy as
+herself chose to accept her pretensions. One revelation vouchsafed to
+her was to the effect that Robespierre was a Messiah and the new
+redeemer of the human race. The Committee of General Security resolved
+to indict this absurd sect. Vadier,&mdash;one of the roughest of the men whom
+the insurrections of Paris had brought to the front&mdash;reported on the
+charges to the Convention (27 Prairial, June 15), and he took the
+opportunity to make Robespierre look profoundly ridiculous. The
+unfortunate Messiah sat on his bench, gnawing his lips with bitter rage,
+while, amid the sneers and laughter of the Convention, the officers
+brought to the bar the foolish creatures who had called him the Son of
+God. His thin pride and prudish self-respect were unutterably affronted,
+and he quite understood that the ridicule of the mysticism of Th&eacute;ot was
+an indirect pleasantry upon his own Supreme Being. He flew to the
+Committee of Public Safety, angrily reproached them for permitting the
+prosecution, summoned Fouquier-Tinville, and peremptorily ordered him to
+let the matter drop. In vain did the public prosecutor point out that
+there was a decree of the Convention ordering<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span> him to proceed.
+Robespierre was inexorable. The Committee of General Security were
+baffled, and the prosecution ended. 'Lutteur impuissant et fatigu&eacute;,'
+says M. Hamel, the most thoroughgoing defender of Robespierre, upon
+this, 'il va se retirer, moralement du moins.' Impotent and wearied! But
+he had just won a most signal victory for good sense and humanity. Why
+was it the only one? If Robespierre was able to save Th&eacute;ot, why could he
+not save C&eacute;cile Renault?</p>
+
+<p>C&eacute;cile Renault was a young seamstress who was found one evening at the
+door of Robespierre's lodging, calling out in a state of exaltation that
+she would fain see what a tyrant looked like. She was arrested, and upon
+her were found two little knives used for the purposes of her trade.
+That she should be arrested and imprisoned was natural enough. The times
+were charged with deadly fire. People had not forgotten that Marat had
+been murdered in his own house. Only a few days before C&eacute;cile Renault's
+visit to Robespierre, an assassin had fired a pistol at Collot d'Herbois
+on the staircase of his apartment. We may make allowance for the
+excitement of the hour, and Robespierre had as much right to play the
+martyr, as had Lewis the Fifteenth after the incident of Damiens' rusty
+pen-knife. But the histrionic exigencies of the chief of a faction ought
+not to be pushed too far. And it was a monstrous crime that because
+Robespierre found it convenient to pose as sacrificial victim at the
+Club, therefore he should have had no scruple in seeing not only the
+wretched C&eacute;cile, but her father,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span> her aunt, and one of her brothers, all
+despatched to the guillotine in the red shirt of parricide, as agents of
+Pitt and Coburg, and assassins of the father of the land. This was
+exactly two days after he had shown his decisive power in the affair of
+the religious illuminists. The only possible conclusion open to a plain
+man after weighing and putting aside all the sophisms with which this
+affair has been obscured, is that Robespierre interfered in the one case
+because its further prosecution would have tended to make him
+ridiculous, and he did not interfere in the other, because the more
+exaggerated, the more melodramatic, the more murderous it was made, the
+more interesting an object would he seem in the eyes of his adorers.</p>
+
+<p>The second fact bearing on Robespierre's humanity is this. He had
+encouraged the formation and stimulated the activity of popular
+commissions, who should provide victims for the Revolutionary Tribunal.
+On the Second of Messidor (June 20) a list containing one hundred and
+thirty-eight names was submitted for the ratification of the Committee.
+The Committee endorsed the bloody document, and the last signature of
+the endorsement is that of him, who had resigned a post in his youth
+rather than be a party to putting a man to death. As was observed at the
+time, Robespierre in doing this, suppressed his pique against his
+colleagues, in order to take part in a measure, that was a sort of
+complement to his Law of Prairial.</p>
+
+<p>From these two circumstances, then, even if there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span> were no other, we are
+justified in inferring that Robespierre was struck by no remorse at the
+thought that it was his law which had unbound the hands of the horrible
+genie of civil murder. His mind was wholly absorbed in the calculations
+of a frigid egoism. His intelligence, as we have always to remember, was
+very dim. He only aimed at one thing at once, and that was seldom
+anything very great or far-reaching. He was a man of peering and
+obscured vision in face of practical affairs. In passing the Law of
+Prairial, his designs&mdash;and they were meritorious and creditable designs
+enough in themselves&mdash;had been directed against the corrupt chiefs, such
+as Tallien and Fouch&eacute;, and against the fierce and coarse spirits of the
+Committee of General Security, such as Vadier and Voulland. Robespierre
+was above all things a precisian. He had a sentimental sympathy with the
+common people in the abstract, but his spiritual pride, his pedantry,
+his formalism, his personal fastidiousness, were all wounded to the very
+quick by the kind of men whom the Revolution had thrown to the surface.
+Gouverneur Morris, then the American minister, describes most of the
+members of the two Committees as the very dregs of humanity, with whom
+it is a stain to have any dealings; as degraded men only worthy of the
+profoundest contempt. Danton had said: 'Robespierre is the least of a
+scoundrel of any of the band.' The Committee of General Security
+represented the very elements by which Robespierre was most revolted.
+They offended<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span> his respectability; their evil manners seemed to tarnish
+that good name which his vanity hoped to make as revered all over
+Europe, as it already was among his partisans in France. It was
+indispensable therefore to cut them off from the revolutionary
+government, just as H&eacute;bert and as Danton had been cut off. His
+colleagues of Public Safety refused to lend themselves to this.
+Henceforth, with characteristically narrow tenacity, he looked round for
+new combinations, but, so far as I can see, with no broader design than
+to enable him to punish these particular objects of his very just
+detestation.</p>
+
+<p>The position of sections and interests which ended in the Revolution of
+Thermidor, is one of the most extraordinarily intricate and entangled in
+the history of faction. It would take a volume to follow out all the
+peripeteias of the drama. Here we can only enumerate in a few sentences
+the parties to the contest and the conditions of the game. The reader
+will easily discern the difficulty in Robespierre's way of making an
+effective combination. First, there were the two Committees. Of these
+the one, the General Security, was thoroughly hostile to Robespierre;
+its members, as we have said, were wild and hardy spirits, with no
+political conception, and with a great contempt for fine phrases and
+philosophical principles. They knew Robespierre's hatred for them, and
+they heartily returned it. They were the steadfast centre of the
+changing schemes which ended in his downfall. The Committee of Public
+Safety<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span> was divided. Carnot hated Saint Just, and Collot d'Herbois hated
+Robespierre, and Billaud had a sombre distrust of Robespierre's
+counsels. Shortly speaking, the object of the Billaudists was to retain
+their power, and their power was always menaced from two quarters, the
+Convention and Paris. If they let Robespierre have his own way against
+his enemies, would they not be at his mercy whenever he chose to devise
+a popular insurrection against them? Yet if they withstood Robespierre,
+they could only do so through the agency of the Convention, and to fall
+back upon the Convention would be to give that body an express
+invitation to resume the power that had, in the pressure of the crisis a
+year before, been delegated to the Committee, and periodically renewed
+afterwards. The dilemma of Billaud seemed desperate, and events
+afterwards proved that it was so.</p>
+
+<p>If we turn to the Convention, we find the position equally distracting.
+They, too, feared another insurrection and a second decimation. If the
+Right helped Robespierre to destroy the Fouch&eacute;s and Vadiers, he would be
+stronger than ever; and what security had they against a repetition of
+the violence of the Thirty-first of May? If the Dantonists joined in
+destroying Robespierre, they would be helping the Right, and what
+security had they against a Girondin reaction? On the other hand, the
+Centre might fairly hope, just what Billaud feared, that if the
+Committee came to the Convention to crush Robespierre, that would end in
+a combination strong<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span> enough to enable the Convention to crush the
+Committees.</p>
+
+<p>Much depended on military success. The victories of the generals were
+the great strength of the Committee. For so long it would be difficult
+to turn opinion against a triumphant administration. 'At the first
+defeat,' Robespierre had said to Bar&egrave;re, 'I await you.' But the defeat
+did not come. The plotting went on with incessant activity; on one hand,
+Robespierre, aided by Saint Just and Couthon, strengthening himself at
+the Jacobin Club, and through that among the sections; on the other, the
+Mountain and the Committee of General Security trying to win over the
+Right, more contemptuously christened the Marsh or the Belly, of the
+Convention. The Committee of Public Safety was not yet fully decided how
+to act.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of the first week of Thermidor, Robespierre could endure the
+tension no longer. He had tried to fortify his nerves for the struggle
+by riding, but with so little success that he was lifted off his horse
+fainting. He endeavoured to steady himself by diligent pistol-practice.
+But nothing gave him initiative and the sinews of action. Saint Just
+urged him to raise Paris. Some bold men proposed to carry off the
+members of the Committee bodily from their midnight deliberations.
+Robespierre declined, and fell back on what he took to be his greatest
+strength and most unfailing resource; he prepared a speech. On the
+Eighth of Thermidor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span> he delivered it to the Convention, amid intense
+excitement both within its walls and without. All Paris knew that they
+were now on the eve of one more of the famous Days; the revolution of
+Thermidor had begun.</p>
+
+<p>The speech of the Eighth Thermidor has seemed to men of all parties
+since a masterpiece of tactical ineptitude. If Robespierre had been a
+statesman instead of a phrasemonger, he had a clear course. He ought to
+have taken the line of argument that Danton would have taken. That is to
+say, he ought to have identified himself fully with the interests and
+security of the Convention; to have accepted the growing resolution to
+close the Terror; to have boldly pressed the abolition of the Committee
+of General Security, and the removal from the Committee of Public Safety
+of Billaud, Collot, Bar&egrave;re; to have proposed to send about fifty persons
+to Cayenne for life; and to have urged a policy of peace with the
+foreign powers. This was the substantial wisdom and real interest of the
+position. The task was difficult, because his hearers had the best
+possible reasons for knowing that the author of the Law of Prairial was
+a Terrorist on principle. And in truth we know that Robespierre had no
+definite intention of erecting clemency into a rule. He had not mental
+strength enough to throw off the profound apprehension, which the
+incessant alarms of the last five years had engendered in him; and the
+only device, that he could imagine for maintaining the republic against<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>
+traitors, was to stimulate the rigour of the Revolutionary Tribunal.</p>
+
+<p>If, however, Robespierre lacked the grasp which might have made him the
+representative of a broad and stable policy, it was at least his
+interest to persuade the men of the Plain that he entertained no designs
+against them. And this is what in his own mind he intended. But to do it
+effectively, it was clearly best to tell his hearers, in so many words,
+whom he really wished them to strike. That would have relieved the
+majority, and banished the suspicion which had been busily fomented by
+his enemies, that he had in his pocket a long list of their names, for
+proscription. But Robespierre, having for the first time in his life
+ventured on aggressive action without the support of a definite party,
+faltered. He dared not to designate his enemies face to face and by
+name. Instead of that, he talked vaguely of conspirators against the
+republic, and calumniators of himself. There was not a single bold,
+definite, unmistakable sentence in the speech from first to last. The
+men of the Plain were insecure and doubtful; they had no certainty that
+among conspirators and calumniators he did not include too many of
+themselves. People are not so readily seized by grand phrases, when
+their heads are at stake. The sitting was long, and marked by changing
+currents and reverses. When they broke up, all was left uncertain.
+Robespierre had suffered a check. Billaud felt that he could no longer
+hesitate in joining the combination against his colleague.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span> Each party
+was aware that the next day must seal the fate of one or other of them.
+There is a legend that in the evening Robespierre walked in the Champs
+Elys&eacute;es with his betrothed, accompanied as usual by his faithful dog,
+Brount. They admired the purple of the sunset, and talked of the
+prospect of a glorious to-morrow. But this is apocryphal. The evening
+was passed in no lover's saunterings, but amid the storm and uproar of
+the Club. He went to the Jacobins to read over again his speech of the
+day. 'It is my testament of death,' he said, amid the passionate
+protestations of his devoted followers. He had been talking for the last
+three years of his willingness to drink the hemlock, and to offer his
+breast to the poniards of tyrants. That was a fashion of the speech of
+the time, and in earlier days it had been more than a fashion of speech,
+for Brunswick would have given them short shrift. But now, when he
+talked of his last testament, Robespierre did not intend it to be so if
+he could prevent it. When he went to rest that night, he had a tolerably
+calm hope that he should win the next day's battle in the Convention,
+when he was aware that Saint Just would attack the Committees openly and
+directly. If he would have allowed his band to invade the Pavillon de
+Flore, and carry off or slay the Committees who sat up through the
+night, the battle would have been won when he awoke. His friends are
+justified in saying that his strong respect for legality was the cause
+of his ruin.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Men in all ages have had a superstitious fondness for connecting awful
+events in their lives with portents and signs among the outer elements.
+It was noticed that the heat during the terrible days of Thermidor was
+more intense than had been known within the memory of man. The
+thermometer never fell below sixty-five degrees in the coolest part of
+the night, and in the daytime men and women and beasts of burden fell
+down dead in the streets. By five o'clock in the morning of the Ninth
+Thermidor, the galleries of the Convention were filled by a boisterous
+and excited throng. At ten o'clock the proceedings began as usual with
+the reading of correspondence from the departments and from the armies.
+Robespierre, who had been escorted from his lodgings by the usual body
+of admirers, instead of taking his ordinary seat, remained standing by
+the side of the tribune. It is a familiar fact that moments of appalling
+suspense are precisely those in which we are most ready involuntarily to
+note a trifle; everybody observed that Robespierre wore the coat of
+violet-blue silk and the white nankeens in which a few weeks previously
+he had done honour to the Supreme Being.</p>
+
+<p>The galleries seemed as enthusiastic as ever. The men of the Plain and
+the Marsh had lost the abject mien with which they usually cowered
+before Robespierre's glance; they wore a courageous air of judicial
+reserve. The leaders of the Mountain wandered restlessly to and fro
+among the corridors. At noon Tallien saw that Saint Just had ascended
+the tribune.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span> Instantly he rushed down into the chamber, knowing that
+the battle had now begun in fierce earnest. Saint Just had not got
+through two sentences, before Tallien interrupted him. He began to
+insist with energy that there should be an end to the equivocal phrases
+with which Paris had been too long alarmed by the Triumvirate. Billaud,
+fearing to be outdone in the attack, hastily forced his way to the
+tribune, broke into what Tallien was saying, and proceeded dexterously
+to discredit Robespierre's allies without at once assailing Robespierre
+himself. Le Bas ran in a fury to stop him; Collot d'Herbois, the
+president, declared Le Bas out of order; the hall rang with cries of 'To
+prison! To the Abbey!' and Le Bas was driven from the tribune. This was
+the beginning of the tempest. Robespierre's enemies knew that they were
+fighting for their lives, and this inspired them with a strong and
+resolute power that is always impressive in popular assemblies. He still
+thought himself secure. Billaud pursued his accusations. Robespierre, at
+last, unable to control himself, scaled the tribune. There suddenly
+burst forth from Tallien and his partisans vehement shouts of 'Down with
+the tyrant! down with the tyrant!' The galleries were swept by a wild
+frenzy of vague agitation; the president's bell poured loud incessant
+clanging into the tumult; the men of the Plain held themselves firm and
+silent; in the tribune raged ferocious groups, Tallien menacing
+Robespierre with a dagger, Billaud roaring out proposals to arrest this
+person and that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> Robespierre gesticulating, threatening, yelling,
+shrieking. His enemies knew that if he were once allowed to get a
+hearing, his authority might even yet overawe the waverers. A
+penetrative word or a heroic gesture might lose them the day. The
+majority of the chamber still hesitated. They called for Bar&egrave;re, in
+whose adroit faculty for discovering the winning side they had the
+confidence of long experience. Robespierre, recovering some of his calm,
+and perceiving now that he had really to deal with a serious revolt,
+again asked to be heard before Bar&egrave;re. But the cries for Bar&egrave;re were
+louder than ever. Bar&egrave;re spoke, in a sense hostile to Robespierre, but
+warily and without naming him.</p>
+
+<p>Then there was a momentary lull. The Plain was uncertain. The battle
+might even now turn either way. Robespierre made another attempt to
+speak, but Tallien with intrepid fury broke out into a torrent of louder
+and more vehement invective. Robespierre's shrill voice was heard in
+disjected snatches, amidst the violent tones of Tallien, the yells of
+the president calling Robespierre to order, the murderous clanging of
+the bell. Then came that supreme hour of the struggle, whose tale has
+been so often told, when Robespierre turned from his old allies of the
+Mountain, and succeeded in shrieking out an appeal to the probity and
+virtue of the Right and the Plain. To his horror, even these despised
+men, after a slight movement, remained mute. Then his cheeks blanched,
+and the sweat ran down his face. But anger and scornful im<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>patience
+swiftly came back and restored him. <i>President of assassins</i>, he cried
+out to Thuriot, <i>for the last time I ask to be heard. Thou canst not
+speak</i>, called one, <i>the blood of Danton chokes thee</i>. He flung himself
+down the steps of the tribune, and rushed towards the benches of the
+Right. <i>Come no further</i>, cried another, <i>Vergniaud and Condorcet sat
+here</i>. He regained the tribune, but his speech was gone. He was reduced
+to the dregs of an impotent and gasping voiceless gesticulation, like
+the strife of one in a nightmare.</p>
+
+<p>The day was lost. The tension of a passionate and violent struggle
+prolonged for many hours always at length exasperates onlookers with
+something of the brute ferocity of the actors. The physical strain stirs
+the tiger in the blood; they conceive a cruel hatred against weakness,
+just as the heated throng of a Roman amphitheatre turned up their thumbs
+for the instant despatch of the unfortunate swordsman who had been too
+ready to lower his arms. The Right, the Plain, even the galleries,
+despised the man who had succumbed. If Robespierre had possessed the
+physical strength of Mirabeau or Danton, the Ninth Thermidor would have
+been another of his victories. He was crushed by the relentless ferocity
+and endurance of his antagonists. A decree for his arrest was resolved
+upon by acclamation. He cast a glance at the galleries, as marvelling
+that they should remain passive in face of an outrage on his person.
+They were mute. The ushers advanced with hesitation to do their duty,
+and not without trembling carried him away, along with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> Couthon and
+Saint Just. The brother, for whom he had made honourable sacrifices in
+days that seemed to be divided from the present by an abyss of
+centuries, insisted with fine heroism on sharing his fate, and Augustin
+Robespierre and Le Bas were led off to the prisons along with their
+leader and idol.</p>
+
+<p>It was now a little after four o'clock. The Convention, with the
+self-possession that so often amazes us in its proceedings, went on with
+formal business for another hour. At five they broke up. For life, as
+the poets tell, is a daily stage-play; men declaim their high heroic
+parts, then doff the buskin or the sock, wash away the paint from their
+cheeks, and gravely sit down to meat. The Conventionals, as they ate
+their dinners, were unconscious, apparently, that the great crisis of
+the drama was still to come. The next twelve hours were to witness the
+climax. Robespierre had been crushed by the Convention; it remained to
+be seen whether the Convention would not now be crushed by the Commune
+of Paris.</p>
+
+<p>Robespierre was first conducted to the prisons of the Luxembourg. The
+gaoler, on some plea of informality, refused to receive him. The
+terrible prisoner was next taken to the Mairie, where he remained among
+joyful friends from eight in the evening until eleven. Meanwhile the old
+insurrectionary methods of the nights of June and of August in '92, of
+May and of June in '93, were again followed. The beating of the <i>rappel</i>
+and the <i>g&eacute;n&eacute;rale</i> was heard in all the sections; the tocsin sounded its
+dreadful note, remind<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>ing all who should hear it that insurrection is
+the most sacred and the most indispensable of duties. Hanriot, the
+commandant of the forces, had been arrested in the evening, but he was
+speedily released by the agents of the Commune. The Council issued
+manifestoes and decrees from the Common Hall every moment. The barriers
+were closed. Cannon were posted opposite the doors of the hall of the
+Convention. The quays were thronged. Emissaries sped to and fro between
+the Jacobin Club and the Common Hall, and between these two centres and
+each of the forty-eight sections. It is one of the inscrutable mysteries
+of this delirious night, that Hanriot did not at once use the force at
+his command to break up the Convention. There is no obvious reason why
+he should not have done so. The members of the Convention had
+re-assembled after their dinner, towards seven o'clock. The hall which
+had resounded with the shrieks and yells of the furious gladiators of
+the factions all day, now lent a lugubrious echo to gloomy reports which
+one member after another delivered from the shadow of the tribune.
+Towards nine o'clock the members of the two dread Committees came in
+panic to seek shelter among their colleagues, 'as dejected in their
+peril,' says an eyewitness, 'as they had been cruel and insolent in the
+hour of their supremacy.' When they heard that Hanriot had been
+released, and that guns were at their door, all gave themselves up for
+lost and made ready for death. News came that Robespierre had broken his
+arrest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> and gone to the Common Hall. Robespierre, after urgent and
+repeated solicitations, had been at length persuaded about an hour
+before midnight to leave the Mairie and join his partisans of the
+Commune. This was an act of revolt against the Convention, for the
+Mairie was a legal place of detention, and so long as he was there, he
+was within the law. The Convention with heroic intrepidity declared both
+Hanriot and Robespierre beyond the pale of the law. This prompt measure
+was its salvation. Twelve members were instantly named to carry the
+decree to all the sections. With the scarf of office round their waists,
+and a sabre in hand, they sallied forth. Mounting horses, and escorted
+by attendants with flaring torches, they scoured Paris, calling all good
+citizens to the succour of the Convention, haranguing crowds at the
+street corners with power and authority, and striking the imaginations
+of men. At midnight heavy rain began to fall.</p>
+
+<p>The leaders of the Commune meanwhile, in full confidence that victory
+was sure, contented themselves with incessant issue of paper decrees, to
+each of which the Convention replied by a counter-decree. Those who have
+studied the situation most minutely, are of opinion that even so late as
+one o'clock in the morning, the Commune might have made a successful
+defence, although it had lost the opportunity, which it had certainly
+possessed up to ten o'clock, of destroying the Convention. But on this
+occasion the genius of insurrection slumbered. And there was a genuine<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>
+division of opinion in the eastern quarters of Paris, the result of a
+grim distrust of the man who had helped to slay H&eacute;bert and Chaumette. At
+a word this distrust began to declare itself. The opinion of the
+sections became more and more distracted. One armed group cried, <i>Down
+with the Convention!</i> Another armed group cried, <i>The Convention for
+ever, and down with the Commune!</i> The two great faubourgs were all
+astir, and three battalions were ready to march. Emissaries from the
+Convention actually succeeded in persuading them&mdash;such the dementia of
+the night&mdash;that Robespierre was a royalist agent, and that the Commune
+were about to deliver the little Lewis from his prison in the Temple.
+One body of communist partisans after another was detached from its
+allegiance. The deluge of rain emptied the Place de Gr&egrave;ve, and when
+companies came up from the sections in obedience to orders from Hanriot
+and the Commune, the silence made them suspect a trap, and they withdrew
+towards the great metropolitan church or elsewhere.</p>
+
+<p>Barras, whom the Convention had charged with its military defence,
+gathered together some six thousand men. With the right instinct of a
+man who had studied the history of Paris since the July of 1789, he
+foresaw the advantage of being the first to make the attack. He arranged
+his forces into two divisions. One of them marched along the quays to
+take the Common Hall in front; the other along the Rue Saint Honor&eacute; to
+take it in flank. Inside the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span> Common Hall the staircases and corridors
+were alive with bustling messengers, and those mysterious busybodies who
+are always found lingering without a purpose on the skirts of great
+historic scenes. Robespierre and the other chiefs were in a small room,
+preparing manifestoes and signing decrees. They were curiously unaware
+of the movements of the Convention. An aggressive attack by the party of
+authority upon the party of insurrection was unknown in the tradition of
+revolt. They had an easy assurance that at daybreak their forces would
+be prepared once more to tramp along the familiar road westwards. It was
+now half-past two. Robespierre had just signed the first two letters of
+his name to a document before him, when he was startled by cries and
+uproar in the Place below. In a few instants he lay stretched on the
+ground, his jaw shattered by a pistol-shot. His brother had either
+fallen or had leaped out of the window. Couthon was hurled over a
+staircase, and lay for dead. Saint Just was a prisoner.</p>
+
+<p>Whether Robespierre was shot by an officer of the Conventional force, or
+attempted to blow out his own brains, we shall never know, any more than
+we shall ever be quite assured how Rousseau, his spiritual master, came
+to an end. The wounded man was carried, a ghastly sight, first to the
+Committee of Public Safety, and then to the Conciergerie, where he lay
+in silent stupefaction through the heat of the summer day. As he was an
+outlaw, the only legal preliminary before execution was to identify
+him.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> At five in the afternoon, he was raised into the cart Couthon and
+the younger Robespierre lay, confused wrecks of men, at the bottom of
+it. Hanriot and Saint Just, bruised, begrimed, and foul, completed the
+band. One who walks from the Palace of Justice, over the bridge, along
+the Rue Saint Honor&eacute;, into the Rue Royale, and so to the Luxor column,
+retraces the <i>via dolorosa</i> of the Revolution on the afternoon of the
+Tenth of Thermidor.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The end of the intricate man&oelig;uvres known as the Revolution of
+Thermidor was the recovery of authority by the Convention. The
+insurrections, known as the days of the Twelfth Germinal, First
+Prairial, and Thirteenth Vend&eacute;miaire, all ended in the victory of the
+Convention over the revolutionary forces of Paris. The Committees, on
+the other hand, had beaten Robespierre, but they had ruined themselves.
+Very gradually the movement towards order, which had begun in the mind
+of Danton, and had gone on in the cloudy purposes of Robespierre, became
+definite. But it was in the interest of very different ideas from those
+of either Danton or of Robespierre. A White Terror succeeded the Red
+Terror. Not at once, however; it was not until nine months after the
+death of Robespierre, that the reaction was strong enough to smite his
+colleagues of the two Committees. The surviving Girondins had come back
+to their seats in the Convention: the Dantonians had not forgiven the
+execution of their chief. These two parties were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> bent on vengeance. In
+April, 1795, a decree was passed banishing Billaud de Varennes, Collot
+d'Herbois, and Bar&egrave;re. In the following month the leaders of the
+Committee of General Security were thrown into prison. The revolution
+had passed into new currents. We cannot see any reasons for thinking
+that those currents would have led to any happier results if Robespierre
+had won the battle. Tallien, Fouch&eacute;, Barras, and the rest may have been
+thoroughly bad men. But then what qualities had Robespierre for building
+up a state? He had neither strength of practical character, nor firm
+breadth of political judgment, nor a sound social doctrine. When we
+compare him,&mdash;I do not say with Frederick of Prussia, with Jefferson,
+with Washington,&mdash;but with the group of able men who made the closing
+year of the Convention honourable and of good service to France, we have
+a measure of Robespierre's profound and pitiable incompetence.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3), by John Morley
+
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+Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3), by John Morley
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3)
+       Essay 1: Robespierre
+
+Author: John Morley
+
+Release Date: March 3, 2007 [EBook #20733]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBESPIERRE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Paul Murray, Graeme Mackreth and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CRITICAL
+MISCELLANIES
+
+BY
+
+JOHN MORLEY
+
+VOL. I. Essay 1: Robespierre
+
+London
+MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
+NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
+1904
+
+CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
+
+ROBESPIERRE.
+
+I.
+
+                                                                 PAGE
+
+Introduction                                                        1
+
+Different views of Robespierre                                      4
+
+His youthful history                                                5
+
+An advocate at Arras                                                7
+
+Acquaintance with Carnot                                           10
+
+The summoning of the States-General                                11
+
+Prophecies of revolution                                           12
+
+Reforming Ministers tried and dismissed                            13
+
+Financial state of France                                          14
+
+Impotence of the Monarchy                                          17
+
+The Constituent Assembly                                           19
+
+Robespierre interprets the revolutionary movement rightly          21
+
+The Sixth of October 1789                                          23
+
+Alteration in Robespierre's position                               25
+
+Character of Louis XVI.                                            28
+
+And of Marie Antoinette                                            29
+
+The Constitution and Robespierre's mark upon it                    34
+
+Instability of the new arrangements                                37
+
+Importance of Jacobin ascendancy                                   41
+
+The Legislative Assembly                                           42
+
+Robespierre's power at the Jacobin Club                            44
+
+His oratory                                                        45
+
+The true secret of his popularity                                  48
+
+Aggravation of the crisis in the spring of 1792                    50
+
+The Tenth of August 1792                                           52
+
+Danton                                                             53
+
+Compared with Robespierre                                          55
+
+Robespierre compared with Marat and with Sieyes                    57
+
+Character of the Terror                                            58
+
+
+II.
+
+Fall of the Girondins indispensable                                60
+
+France in desperate peril                                          61
+
+The Committee of Public Safety                                     65
+
+At the Tuileries                                                   67
+
+The contending factions                                            70
+
+Reproduced an older conflict of theories                           72
+
+Robespierre's attitude                                             73
+
+The Hebertists                                                     77
+
+Chaumette and his fundamental error                                80
+
+Robespierre and the atheists                                       82
+
+His bitterness towards Anacharsis Clootz                           86
+
+New turn of events (March 1794)                                    90
+
+First breach in the Jacobin ranks: the Hebertists                  90
+
+Robespierre's abandonment of Danton                                91
+
+Second breach: the Dantonians (April 1794)                         95
+
+Another reminiscence of this date                                  97
+
+Robespierre's relations to the Committees changed                  98
+
+The Feast of the Supreme Being                                    101
+
+Its false philosophy                                              103
+
+And political inanity                                             104
+
+The Law of Prairial                                               106
+
+Robespierre's motive in devising it                               107
+
+It produces the Great Terror                                      109
+
+Robespierre's chagrin at its miscarriage                          112
+
+His responsibility not to be denied                               112
+
+  (1) Affair of Catherine Theot                                   113
+
+        "       Cecile Renault                                    114
+
+  (2) Robespierre stimulated popular commissions                  115
+
+The drama of Thermidor: the combatants                            117
+
+Its conditions                                                    118
+
+The Eighth Thermidor                                              119
+
+Inefficiency of Robespierre's speech                              121
+
+The Ninth Thermidor                                               123
+
+Famous scene in the Convention                                    125
+
+Robespierre a prisoner                                            127
+
+Struggle between the Convention and the Commune                   129
+
+Death of Robespierre                                              131
+
+Ultimate issue of the struggle between the Committees
+and the Convention                                                132
+
+
+
+
+ROBESPIERRE.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+A French writer has recently published a careful and interesting volume
+on the famous events which ended in the overthrow of Robespierre and the
+close of the Reign of Terror.[1] These events are known in the historic
+calendar as the Revolution of Thermidor in the Year II. After the fall
+of the monarchy, the Convention decided that the year should begin with
+the autumnal equinox, and that the enumeration should date from the
+birth of the Republic. The Year I. opens on September 22, 1792; the Year
+II. opens on the same day of 1793. The month of Thermidor begins on July
+19. The memorable Ninth Thermidor therefore corresponds to July 27,
+1794. This has commonly been taken as the date of the commencement of a
+counter-revolution, and in one sense it was so. Comte, however, and
+others have preferred to fix the reaction at the execution of Danton
+(April 5, 1794), or Robespierre's official proclamation of Deism in the
+Festival of the Supreme Being (May 7, 1794).
+
+[Footnote 1: _La Revolution de Thermidor_. Par Ch. D'Hericault. Paris:
+Didier, 1876.]
+
+M. D'Hericault does not belong to the school of writers who treat the
+course of history as a great high road, following a firmly traced line,
+and set with plain and ineffaceable landmarks. The French Revolution has
+nearly always been handled in this way, alike by those who think it
+fruitful in blessings, and by their adversaries, who pronounce it a
+curse inflicted by the wrath of Heaven. Historians have looked at the
+Revolution as a plain landsman looks at the sea. To the landsman the
+ocean seems one huge immeasurable flood, obeying a simple law of ebb and
+flow, and offering to the navigator a single uniform force. Yet in truth
+we know that the oceanic movement is the product of many forces; the
+seeming uniformity covers the energy of a hundred currents and
+counter-currents; the sea-floor is not even nor the same, but is subject
+to untold conditions of elevation and subsidence; the sea is not one
+mass, but many masses moving along definite lines of their own. It is
+the same with the great tides of history. Wise men shrink from summing
+them up in single propositions. That the French Revolution led to an
+immense augmentation of happiness, both for the French and for mankind,
+can only be denied by the Pope. That it secured its beneficent results
+untempered by any mixture of evil, can only be maintained by men as mad
+as Doctor Pangloss. The Greek poetess Corinna said to the youthful
+Pindar, when he had interwoven all the gods and goddesses in the Theban
+mythology into a single hymn, that we should sow with the hand and not
+with the sack. Corinna's monition to the singer is proper to the
+interpreter of historical truth: he should cull with the hand, and not
+sweep in with the scythe. It is doubtless mere pedantry to abstain from
+the widest conception of the sum of a great movement. A clear, definite,
+and stable idea of the meaning in the history of human progress of such
+vast groups of events as the Reformation or the Revolution, is
+indispensable for any one to whom history is a serious study of society.
+It is just as important, however, not to forget that they were really
+groups of events, and not in either case a single uniform movement. The
+World-Epos is after all only a file of the morning paper in a state of
+glorification. A sensible man learns, in everyday life, to abstain from
+praising and blaming character by wholesale; he becomes content to say
+of this trait that it is good, and of that act that it was bad. So in
+history, we become unwilling to join or to admire those who insist upon
+transferring their sentiment upon the whole to their judgment upon each
+part. We seek to be allowed to retain a decided opinion as to the final
+value to mankind of a long series of transactions, and yet not to commit
+ourselves to set the same estimate on each transaction in particular,
+still less on each person associated with it. Why shall we not prize the
+general results of the Reformation, without being obliged to defend John
+of Leyden and the Munster Anabaptists?
+
+M. D'Hericault's volume naturally suggests such reflections as these. Of
+all the men of the Revolution, Robespierre has suffered most from the
+audacious idolatry of some writers, and the splenetic impatience of
+others. M. Louis Blanc and M. Ernest Hamel talk of him as an angel or a
+prophet, and the Ninth Thermidor is a red day indeed in their
+martyrology. Michelet and M. D'Hericault treat him as a mixture of
+Cagliostro and Caligula, both a charlatan and a miscreant. We are
+reminded of the commencement of an address of the French Senate to the
+first Bonaparte: 'Sire,' they began, 'the desire for perfection is one
+of the worst maladies that can afflict the human mind.' This bold
+aphorism touches one of the roots of the judgments we pass both upon men
+and events. It is because people so irrationally think fit to insist
+upon perfection, that Robespierre's admirers would fain deny that he
+ever had a fault, and the tacit adoption of the same impracticable
+standard makes it easier for Robespierre's wholesale detractors to deny
+that he had a single virtue or performed a single service. The point of
+view is essentially unfit for history. The real subject of history is
+the improvement of social arrangements, and no conspicuous actor in
+public affairs since the world began saw the true direction of
+improvement with an absolutely unerring eye from the beginning of his
+career to the end. It is folly for the historian, as it is for the
+statesman, to strain after the imaginative unity of the dramatic
+creator. Social progress is an affair of many small pieces and slow
+accretions, and the interest of historic study lies in tracing, amid the
+immense turmoil of events and through the confusion of voices, the
+devious course of the sacred torch, as it shifts from bearer to bearer.
+And it is not the bearers who are most interesting, but the torch.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the old Flemish town of Arras, known in the diplomatic history of the
+fifteenth century by a couple of important treaties, and famous in the
+industrial history of the Middle Ages for its pre-eminence in the
+manufacture of the most splendid kind of tapestry hangings, Maximilian
+Robespierre was born in May 1758. He was therefore no more than five and
+thirty years old when he came to his ghastly end in 1794. His father was
+a lawyer, and, though the surname of the family had the prefix of
+nobility, they belonged to the middle class. When this decorative prefix
+became dangerous, Maximilian Derobespierre dropped it. His great rival,
+Danton, was less prudent or less fortunate, and one of the charges made
+against him was that he had styled himself Monsieur D'Anton.
+
+Robespierre's youth was embittered by sharp misfortune. His mother died
+when he was only seven years old, and his father had so little courage
+under the blow that he threw up his practice, deserted his children, and
+died in purposeless wanderings through Germany. The burden that the weak
+and selfish throw down, must be taken up by the brave. Friendly
+kinsfolk charged themselves with the maintenance of the four orphans.
+Maximilian was sent to the school of the town, whence he proceeded with
+a sizarship to the college of Louis-le-Grand in Paris. He was an apt and
+studious pupil, but austere, and disposed to that sombre cast of spirits
+which is common enough where a lad of some sensibility and much
+self-esteem finds himself stamped with a badge of social inferiority.
+Robespierre's worshippers love to dwell on his fondness for birds: with
+the universal passion of mankind for legends of the saints, they tell
+how the untimely death of a favourite pigeon afflicted him with anguish
+so poignant, that, even sixty long years after, it made his sister's
+heart ache to look back upon the pain of that tragic moment. Always a
+sentimentalist, Robespierre was from boyhood a devout enthusiast for the
+great high priest of the sentimental tribe. Rousseau was then passing
+the last squalid days of his life among the meadows and woods at
+Ermenonville. Robespierre, who could not have been more than twenty at
+the time, for Rousseau died in the summer of 1778, is said to have gone
+on a reverential pilgrimage in search of an oracle from the lonely sage,
+as Boswell and as Gibbon and a hundred others had gone before him.
+Rousseau was wont to use his real adorers as ill as he used his
+imaginary enemies. Robespierre may well have shared the discouragement
+of the enthusiastic father who informed Rousseau that he was about to
+bring up his son on the principles of _Emilius_. 'Then so much the
+worse,' cried the perverse philosopher, 'both for you and your son.' If
+he had been endowed with second sight, he would have thought at least as
+rude a presage due to this last and most ill-starred of a whole
+generation of neophytes.
+
+In 1781 Robespierre returned to Arras, and amid the welcome of his
+relatives and the good hopes of friends began the practice of an
+advocate. For eight years he led an active and seemly life. He was not
+wholly pure from that indiscretion of the young appetite, about which
+the world is mute, but whose better ordering and governance would give a
+diviner brightness to the earth. Still, if he did not escape the ordeal
+of youth, Robespierre was frugal, laborious, and persevering. His
+domestic amiability made him the delight of his sister, and his zealous
+self-sacrifice for the education and advancement in life of his younger
+brother was afterwards repaid by Augustin Robespierre's devotion through
+all the fierce and horrible hours of Thermidor. Though cold in
+temperament, extremely reserved in manners, and fond of industrious
+seclusion, Robespierre did not disdain the social diversions of the
+town. He was a member of a reunion of Rosati, who sang madrigals and
+admired one another's bad verses. Those who love the ironical surprises
+of fate, may picture the young man who was doomed to play so terrible a
+part in terrible affairs, going through the harmless follies of a
+ceremonial reception by the Rosati, taking three deep breaths over a
+rose, solemnly fastening the emblem to his coat, emptying a glass of
+rose-red wine at a draught to the good health of the company, and
+finally reciting couplets that Voltaire would have found almost as
+detestable as the Law of Prairial or the Festival of the Supreme Being.
+More laudable efforts of ambition were prize essays, in which
+Robespierre has the merit of taking the right side in important
+questions. He protested against the inhumanity of laws that inflicted
+civil infamy upon the innocent family of a convicted criminal. And he
+protested against the still more horrid cruelty which reduced
+unfortunate children born out of wedlock to something like the status of
+the mediaeval serf. Robespierre's compositions at this time do not rise
+above the ordinary level of declaiming mediocrity, but they promised a
+manhood of benignity and enlightenment. To compose prize essays on
+political reforms was better than to ignore or to oppose political
+reform. But the course of events afterwards owed their least desirable
+bias to the fact that such compositions were the nearest approach to
+political training that so many of the revolutionary leaders underwent.
+One is inclined to apply to practical politics Arthur Young's sensible
+remark about the endeavour of the French to improve the quality of their
+wool: 'A cultivator at the head of a sheep-farm of 3000 or 4000 acres,
+would in a few years do more for their wools than all the academicians
+and philosophers will effect in ten centuries.'
+
+In his profession he distinguished himself in one or two causes of local
+celebrity. An innovating citizen had been ordered by the authorities to
+remove a lightning-conductor from his house within three days, as being
+a mischievous practical paradox, as well as a danger and an annoyance to
+his neighbours. Robespierre pleaded the innovator's case on appeal, and
+won it. He defended a poor woman who had been wrongfully accused by a
+monk belonging to the powerful corporation of a great neighbouring
+abbey. The young advocate did not even shrink from manfully arguing a
+case against the august Bishop of Arras himself. His independence did
+him no harm. The Bishop afterwards appointed him to the post of judge or
+legal assessor in the episcopal court. This tribunal was a remnant of
+what had once been the sovereign authority and jurisdiction of the
+Bishops of Arras. That a court with the power of life and death should
+thus exist by the side of a proper corporation of civil magistrates, is
+an illustration of the inextricable labyrinth of the French law and its
+administration on the eve of the Revolution. Robespierre did not hold
+his office long. Every one has heard the striking story, how the young
+judge, whose name was within half a dozen years to take a place in the
+popular mind of France and of Europe with the bloodiest monsters of myth
+or history, resigned his post in a fit of remorse after condemning a
+murderer to be executed. 'He is a criminal, no doubt,' Robespierre kept
+groaning in reply to the consolations of his sister, for women are more
+positive creatures than men: 'a criminal, no doubt; but to put a man to
+death!' Many a man thus begins the great voyage with queasy
+sensibilities, and ends it a cannibal.
+
+Among Robespierre's associates in the festive mummeries of the Rosati
+was a young officer of Engineers, who was destined to be his colleague
+in the dread Committee of Public Safety, and to leave an important name
+in French history. In the garrison of Arras, Carnot was quartered,--that
+iron head, whose genius for the administrative organisation of war
+achieved even greater things for the new republic than the genius of
+Louvois had achieved for the old monarchy. Carnot surpassed not only
+Louvois, but perhaps all other names save one in modern military
+history, by uniting to the most powerful gifts for organisation, both
+the strategic talent that planned the momentous campaign of 1794, and
+the splendid personal energy and skill that prolonged the defence of
+Antwerp against the allied army in 1814 Partisans dream of the
+unrivalled future of peace, glory, and freedom that would have fallen to
+the lot of France, if only the gods had brought about a hearty union
+between the military genius of Carnot and the political genius of
+Robespierre. So, no doubt, after the restoration of Charles II. in
+England, there were good men who thought that all would have gone very
+differently, if only the genius of the great creator of the Ironsides
+had taken counsel with the genius of Venner, the Fifth-Monarchy Man, and
+Feak, the Anabaptist prophet.
+
+The time was now come when such men as Robespierre were to be tried with
+fire, when they were to drink the cup of fury and the dregs of the cup
+of trembling. Sybils and prophets have already spoken their inexorable
+decree, as Goethe has said, on the day that first gives the man to the
+world; no time and no might can break the stamped mould of his
+character; only as life wears on, do all its aforeshapen lines come into
+light. He is launched into a sea of external conditions, that are as
+independent of his own will as the temperament with which he confronts
+them. It is action that tries, and variation of circumstance. The leaden
+chains of use bind many an ugly unsuspected prisoner in the soul; and
+when the habit of their lives has been sundered, the most immaculate are
+capable of antics beyond prevision. A great crisis of the world was
+prepared for Robespierre and those others, his allies or his destroyers,
+who with him came like the lightning and went like the wind.
+
+At the end of 1788 the King of France found himself forced to summon the
+States-General. It was their first assembly since 1614. On the memorable
+Fourth of May, 1789, Robespierre appeared at Versailles as one of the
+representatives of the third estate of his native province of Artois.
+The excitement and enthusiasm of the elections to this renowned
+assembly, the immense demands and boundless expectations that they
+disclosed, would have warned a cool observer of events, if in that
+heated air a cool observer could have been found, that the hour had
+struck for the fulfilment of those grim apprehensions of revolution that
+had risen in the minds of many shrewd men, good and bad, in the course
+of the previous half century. No great event in history ever comes
+wholly unforeseen. The antecedent causes are so wide-reaching, many, and
+continuous, that their direction is always sure to strike the eye of one
+or more observers in all its significance. Lewis the Fifteenth, whose
+invincible weariness and heavy disgust veiled a penetrating discernment,
+measured accurately the scope of the conflict between the crown and the
+parlements: but, said he, things as they are will last my time. Under
+the roof of his own palace at Versailles, in the apartment of Madame de
+Pompadour's famous physician, one of Quesnai's economic disciples had
+cried out, 'The realm is in a sore way; it will never be cured without a
+great internal commotion; but woe to those who have to do with it; into
+such work the French go with no slack hand.' Rousseau, in a passage in
+the Confessions, not only divines a speedy convulsion, but with striking
+practical sagacity enumerates the political and social causes that were
+unavoidably drawing France to the edge of the abyss. Lord Chesterfield,
+so different a man from Rousseau, declared as early as 1752, that he saw
+in France every symptom that history had taught him to regard as the
+forerunner of deep change; before the end of the century, so his
+prediction ran, both the trade of king and the trade of priest in France
+would be shorn of half their glory. D'Argenson in the same year declared
+a revolution inevitable, and with a curious precision of anticipation
+assured himself that if once the necessity arose of convoking the
+States-General, they would not assemble in vain: _qu'on y prenne, garde!
+ils seraient fort serieux!_ Oliver Goldsmith, idly wandering through
+France, towards 1755, discerned in the mutinous attitude of the judicial
+corporations, that the genius of freedom was entering the kingdom in
+disguise, and that a succession of three weak monarchs would end in the
+emancipation of the people of France. The most touching of all these
+presentiments is to be found in a private letter of the great Empress,
+the mother of Marie Antoinette herself. Maria Theresa describes the
+ruined state of the French monarchy, and only prays that if it be doomed
+to ruin still more utter, at least the blame may not fall upon her
+daughter. The Empress had not learnt that when the giants of social
+force are advancing from the sombre shadow of the past, with the thunder
+and the hurricane in their hands, our poor prayers are of no more avail
+than the unbodied visions of a dream.
+
+The old popular assembly of the realm was not resorted to before every
+means of dispensing with so drastic a remedy had been tried. Historians
+sometimes write as if Turgot were the only able and reforming minister
+of the century. God forbid that we should put any other minister on a
+level with that high and beneficent figure. But Turgot was not the first
+statesman, both able and patriotic, who had been disgraced for want of
+compliance with the conditions of success at court; he was only the last
+of a series. Chauvelin, a man of vigour and capacity, was dismissed
+with ignominy in 1736. Machault, a reformer, at once courageous and
+wise, shared the same fate twenty years later; and in his case
+revolution was as cruel and as heedless as reaction, for, at the age of
+ninety-one, the old man was dragged, blind and deaf, before the
+revolutionary tribunal and thence despatched to the guillotine. Between
+Chauvelin and Machault, the elder D'Argenson, who was greater than
+either of them, had been raised to power, and then speedily hurled down
+from it (1747), for no better reason than that his manners were uncouth,
+and that he would not waste his time in frivolities that were as the
+breath of life in the great gallery at Versailles and on the
+smooth-shaven lawns of Fontainebleau.
+
+Not only had wise counsellors been tried; consultative assemblies had
+been tried also. Necker had been dismissed in 1781, after publishing the
+memorable Report which first initiated the nation in the elements of
+financial knowledge. The disorder waxed greater, and the monarchy drew
+nearer to bankruptcy each year. The only modern parallel to the state of
+things in France under Lewis the Sixteenth is to be sought in the state
+of things in Egypt or in Turkey. Lewis the Fourteenth had left a debt of
+between two and three thousand millions of livres, but this had been
+wiped out by the heroic operations of Law; operations, by the way, which
+have never yet been scientifically criticised. But the debt soon grew
+again, by foolish wars, by the prodigality of the court, and by the
+rapacity of the nobles. It amounted in 1789 to something like two
+hundred and forty millions sterling; and it is interesting to notice
+that this was exactly the sum of the public debt of Great Britain at the
+same time. The year's excess of expenditure over receipts in 1774 was
+about fifty millions of livres: in 1787 it was one hundred and forty
+millions, or according to a different computation even two hundred
+millions. The material case was not at all desperate, if only the court
+had been less infatuated, and the spirit of the privileged orders had
+been less blind and less vile. The fatality of the situation lay in the
+characters of a handful of men and women. For France was abundant in
+resources, and even at this moment was far from unprosperous, in spite
+of the incredible trammels of law and custom. An able financier, with
+the support of a popular chamber and the assent of the sovereign, could
+have had no difficulty in restoring the public credit. But the
+conditions, simple as they might seem to a patriot or to posterity, were
+unattainable so long as power remained with a caste that were anything
+we please except patriots. An Assembly of Notables was brought together,
+but it was only the empty phantasm of national representation. Yet the
+situation was so serious that even this body, of arbitrary origin as it
+was, still was willing to accept vital reforms. The privileged order,
+who were then as their descendants are now, the worst conservative party
+in Europe, immediately persuaded the magisterial corporation to resist
+the Notables. The judicial corporation or Parlement of Paris had been
+suppressed under Lewis the Fifteenth, and unfortunately revived again at
+the accession of his grandson. By the inconvenient constitution of the
+French government, the assent of that body was indispensable to fiscal
+legislation, on the ground that such legislation was part of the general
+police of the realm. The king's minister, now Lomenie de Brienne,
+devised a new judicial constitution. But the churchmen, the nobles, and
+the lawyers all united in protestations against such a blow. The common
+people are not always the best judges of a remedy for the evils under
+which they are the greatest sufferers, and they broke out in disorder
+both in Paris and the provinces. They discerned an attack upon their
+local independence. Nobody would accept office in the new courts, and
+the administration of justice was at a standstill. A loan was thrown
+upon the market, but the public could not be persuaded to take it up. It
+was impossible to collect the taxes. The interest on the national debt
+was unpaid, and the fundholder was dismayed and exasperated by an
+announcement that only two-fifths would be discharged in cash. A very
+large part of the national debt was held in the form of annuities for
+lives, and men who had invested their savings on the credit of the
+government, saw themselves left without a provision. The total number of
+fundholders cannot be ascertained with any precision, but it must have
+been very considerable, especially in Paris and the other great cities.
+Add to these all the civil litigants in the kingdom, who had portions of
+their property virtually sequestrated by the suspension of the courts
+into which the property had been taken. The resentment of this immense
+body of defrauded public creditors and injured private suitors explains
+the alienation of the middle class from the monarchy. In the convulsions
+of our own time, the moneyed interests have been on one side, and the
+population without money on the other. But in the first and greatest
+convulsion, those who had nothing to lose found their animosities shared
+by those who had had something to lose, and had lost it.
+
+Deliberative assemblies, then, had been tried, and ministers had been
+tried; both had failed, and there was no other device left, except one
+which was destructive to absolute monarchy. Lewis the Sixteenth was in
+1789 in much the same case as that of the King of England in 1640.
+Charles had done his best to raise money without any parliament for
+twelve years: he had lost patience with the Short Parliament; finally,
+he was driven without choice or alternative to face as he best could the
+stout resolution and the wise patriotism of the Long Parliament. Men
+sometimes wonder how it was that Lewis, when he came to find the
+National Assembly unmanageable, and discovering how rapidly he was
+drifting towards the thunders of the revolutionary cataract, did not
+break up a Chamber over which neither the court, nor even a minister so
+popular as Necker, had the least control. It is a question whether the
+sword would not have broken in his hand. Even supposing, however, that
+the army would have consented to a violent movement against the
+Assembly, the King would still have been left in the same desperate
+straits from which he had looked to the States-General to extricate him.
+He might perhaps have dispersed the Assembly; he could not disperse debt
+and deficit. Those monsters would have haunted him as implacably as
+ever. There was no new formula of exorcism, nor any untried enchantment.
+The success of violent designs against the National Assembly, had
+success been possible, could, after all, have been followed by no other
+consummation than the relapse of France into the raging anarchy of
+Poland, or the sullen decrepitude of Turkey.
+
+This will seem to some persons no better than fatalism. But, in truth,
+there are two popular ways of reading the history of events between 1789
+and 1794, and each of them seems to us as bad as the other. According to
+one, whatever happened in the Revolution was good and admirable, because
+it happened. According to the other, something good and admirable was
+always attainable, and, if only bad men had not interposed, always ready
+to happen. Of course, the only sensible view is that many of the
+revolutionary solutions were detestable, but no other solution was
+within reach. This is undoubtedly the best of possible worlds; if the
+best is not so good as we could wish, that is the fault of the
+possibilities. Such a doctrine is neither fatalism nor optimism, but an
+honest recognition of long chains of cause and effect in human affairs.
+
+The great gathering of chosen men was first called States-General; then
+it called itself National Assembly; it is commonly known in history as
+the Constituent Assembly. The name is of ironical association, for the
+constitution which it framed after much travail endured for no more than
+a few months. Its deliberations lasted from May 1789 until September
+1791. Among its members were three principal groups. There was, first, a
+band of blind adherents of the old system of government with all or most
+of its abuses. Second, there was a Centre of timid and one-eyed men, who
+were for transforming the old absolutist system into something that
+should resemble the constitution of our own country. Finally, there was
+a Left, with some differences of shade, but all agreeing in the
+necessity of a thorough remodelling of every institution and most of the
+usages of the country. 'Silence, you thirty votes!' cried Mirabeau one
+day, when he was interrupted by the dissents of the Mountain. This was
+the original measure of the party that in the twinkling of an eye was to
+wield the destinies of France. In our own time we have wondered at the
+rapidity with which a Chamber that was one day on the point of bringing
+back the grandnephew of Lewis the Sixteenth, found itself a little later
+voting that Republic which has since been ratified by the nation, and
+has at this moment the ardent good wishes of every enlightened
+politician in Europe. In the same way it is startling to think that
+within three years of the beheading of Lewis the Sixteenth, there was
+probably not one serious republican in the representative assembly of
+France. Yet it is always so. We might make just the same remark of the
+House of Commons at Westminster in 1640, and of the Assembly of
+Massachusetts or of New York as late as 1770. The final flash of a long
+unconscious train of thought or intent is ever a surprise and a shock.
+It is a mistake to set these swift changes down to political levity;
+they were due rather to quickness of political intuition. It was the
+King's attempt at flight in the summer of 1791 that first created a
+republican party. It was that unhappy exploit, and no theoretical
+preferences, that awoke France to the necessity of choosing between the
+sacrifice of monarchy and the restoration of territorial aristocracy.
+
+Political intuition was never one of Robespierre's conspicuous gifts.
+But he had a doctrine that for a certain time served the same purpose.
+Rousseau had kindled in him a fervid democratic enthusiasm, and had
+penetrated his mind with the principle of the Sovereignty of the People.
+This famous dogma contained implicitly within it the more indisputable
+truth that a society ought to be regulated with a view to the happiness
+of the people. Such a principle made it easier for Robespierre to
+interpret rightly the first phases of the revolutionary movement. It
+helped him to discern that the concentrated physical force of the
+populace was the only sure protection against a civil war. And if a
+civil war had broken out in 1789, instead of 1793, all the advantages of
+authority would have been against the popular party. The first
+insurrection of Paris is associated with the harangue of Camille
+Desmoulins at the Palais Royal, with the fall of the Bastille, with the
+murder of the governor, and a hundred other scenes of melodramatic
+horror and the blood-red picturesque. The insurrection of the Fourteenth
+of July 1789 taught Robespierre a lesson of practical politics, which
+exactly fitted in with his previous theories. In his resentment against
+the oppressive disorder of monarchy and feudalism, he had accepted the
+counter principle that the people can do no wrong, and nobody of sense
+now doubts that in their first great act the people of Paris did what
+was right. Six days after the fall of the Bastille, the Centre were for
+issuing a proclamation denouncing popular violence and ordering rigorous
+vigilance. Robespierre was then so little known in the Assembly that
+even his name was usually misspelt in the journals. From his obscure
+bench on the Mountain he cried out with bitter vehemence against the
+proposed proclamation:--'Revolt! But this revolt is liberty. The battle
+is not at its end. Tomorrow, it may be, the shameful designs against us
+will be renewed; and who will there then be to repulse them, if
+beforehand we declare the very men to be rebels, who have rushed to
+arms for our protection and safety?' This was the cardinal truth of the
+situation. Everybody knows Mirabeau's saying about Robespierre:--'That
+man will go far: he believes every word that he says!' This is much, but
+it is only half. It is not only that the man of power believes what he
+says; what he believes must fit in with the facts and with the demands
+of the time. Now Robespierre's firmness of conviction happened at this
+stage to be rightly matched by his clearness of sight.
+
+It is true that a passionate mob, its unearthly admixture of laughter
+with fury, of vacancy with deadly concentration, is as terrible as some
+uncouth antediluvian, or the unfamiliar monsters of the sea, or one of
+the giant plants that make men shudder with mysterious fear. The history
+of our own country in the eighteenth century tells of the riots against
+meeting-houses in Doctor Sacheverell's time, and the riots against
+papists and their abettors in Lord George Gordon's time, and
+Church-and-King riots in Doctor Priestley's time. It would be too
+daring, therefore, to maintain that the rabble of the poor have any more
+unerring political judgment than the rabble of the opulent. But, in
+France in 1789, Robespierre was justified in saying that revolt meant
+liberty. If there had been no revolt in July, the court party would have
+had time to mature their infatuated designs of violence against the
+Assembly. In October these designs had come to life again. The royalists
+at Versailles had exultant banquets, at which, in the presence of the
+Queen, they drank confusion to all patriots, and trampled the new emblem
+of freedom passionately underfoot. The news of this odious folly soon
+travelled to Paris. Its significance was speedily understood by a
+populace whose wits were sharpened by famine. Thousands of fire-eyed
+women and men tramped intrepidly out towards Versailles. If they had
+done less, the Assembly would have been dispersed or arbitrarily
+decimated, even though such a measure would certainly have left the
+government in desperation.
+
+At that dreadful moment of the Sixth of October, amid the slaughter of
+guards and the frantic yells of hatred against the Queen, it is no
+wonder that some were found to urge the King to flee to Metz. If he had
+accepted the advice, the course of the Revolution would have been
+different; but its march would have been just as irresistible, for
+revolution lay in the force of a hundred combined circumstances. Lewis,
+however, rejected these counsels, and suffered the mob to carry him in
+bewildering procession to his capital and his prison. That great man who
+was watching French affairs with such consuming eagerness from distant
+Beaconsfield in our English Buckinghamshire, instantly divined that this
+procession from Versailles to the Tuileries marked the fall of the
+monarchy. 'A revolution in sentiment, manners, and moral opinions, the
+most important of all revolutions in a word,' was in Burke's judgment to
+be dated from the Sixth of October 1789.
+
+The events of that day did, indeed, give its definite cast to the
+situation. The moral authority of the sovereign came to an end, along
+with the ancient and reverend mystery of the inviolability of his
+person. The Count d'Artois, the King's second brother, one of the most
+worthless of human beings, as incurably addicted to sinister and
+suicidal counsels in 1789 as he was when he overthrew his own throne
+forty years later, had run away from peril and from duty after the
+insurrection of July. After the insurrection of October, a troop of the
+nobles of the court followed him. The personal cowardice of the
+Emigrants was only matched by their political blindness. Many of the
+most unwise measures in the Assembly were only passed by small
+majorities, and the majorities would have been transformed into
+minorities, if in the early days of the Revolution these unworthy men
+had only stood firm at their posts. Selfish oligarchies have scarcely
+ever been wanting in courage. The emigrant noblesse of France are almost
+the only instance of a great privileged and territorial caste that had
+as little bravery as they had patriotism. The explanation is that they
+had been an oligarchy, not of power or duty, but of self-indulgence.
+They were crushed by Richelieu to secure the unity of the monarchy. They
+now effaced themselves at the Revolution, and this secured that far
+greater object, the unity of the nation.
+
+The disappearance of so many of the nobles from France was not the only
+abdication on the part of the conservative powers. Cowed and terrified
+by the events of October, no less than three hundred members of the
+Assembly sought to resign. The average attendance even at the most
+important sittings was often incredibly small. Thus the Chamber came to
+have little more moral authority in face of the people of Paris than had
+the King himself. The people of Paris had themselves become in a day the
+masters of France.
+
+This immense change led gradually to a decisive alteration in the
+position of Robespierre. He found the situation of affairs at last
+falling into perfect harmony with his doctrine. Rousseau had taught him
+that the people ought to be sovereign, and now the people were being
+recognised as sovereign _de facto_ no less than _de jure_. Any
+limitations on the new divine right united the horror of blasphemy to
+the secular wickedness of political treason. After the Assembly had come
+to Paris, a famishing mob in a moment of mad fury murdered an
+unfortunate baker, who was suspected of keeping back bread. These
+paroxysms led to the enactment of a new martial law. Robespierre spoke
+vehemently against it; such a law implied a wrongful distrust of the
+people. Then discussions followed as to the property qualification of an
+elector. Citizens were classed as active and passive. Only those were to
+have votes who paid direct taxes to the amount of three days' wages in
+the year. Robespierre flung himself upon this too famous distinction
+with bitter tenacity. If all men are equal, he cried, then all men
+ought to have votes: if he who only pays the amount of one day's work,
+has fewer rights than another who pays the amount of three days, why
+should not the man who pays ten days have more rights than the other who
+only pays the earnings of three days? This kind of reasoning had little
+weight with the Chamber, but it made the reasoner very popular with the
+throng in the galleries. Even within the Assembly, influence gradually
+came to the man who had a parcel of immutable axioms and postulates, and
+who was ready with a deduction and a phrase for each case as it arose.
+He began to stand out like a needle of sharp rock, amid the flitting
+shadows of uncertain purpose and the vapoury drift of wandering aims.
+
+Robespierre had no social conception, and he had nothing which can be
+described as a policy. He was the prophet of a sect, and had at this
+period none of the aims of the chief of a political party. What he had
+was democratic doctrine, and an intrepid logic. And Robespierre's
+intrepid logic was the nearest approach to calm force and coherent
+character that the first three years of the Revolution brought into
+prominence. When the Assembly met, Necker was the popular idol. Almost
+within a few weeks, this well-meaning, but very incompetent divinity had
+slipped from his throne, and Lafayette had taken his place. Mirabeau
+came next. The ardent and animated genius of his eloquence fitted him
+above all men to ride the whirlwind and direct the storm. And on the
+memorable Twenty-third of June '89, he had shown the genuine audacity
+and resource of a revolutionary statesman, when he stirred the Chamber
+to defy the King's demand, and hailed the royal usher with the
+resounding words:--'You, sir, have neither place nor right of speech. Go
+tell those who sent you that we are here by the will of the people, and
+only bayonets shall drive us hence!' But Mirabeau bore a tainted
+character, and was always distrusted. 'Ah, how the immorality of my
+youth,' he used to say, in words that sum up the tragedy of many a
+puissant life, 'how the immorality of my youth hinders the public good!'
+The event proved that the popular suspicion was just: the patriot is now
+no longer merely suspected, but known, to have sullied his hands with
+the money of the court. He did not sell himself, it has been said; he
+allowed himself to be paid. The distinction was too subtle for men doing
+battle for their lives and for freedom, and Mirabeau's popularity waned
+towards the middle of 1790. The next favourite was Barnave, the generous
+and high-minded spokesman of those sanguine spirits who to the very end
+hoped against hope to save both the throne and its occupant. By the
+spring of 1791 Barnave followed his predecessors into disfavour. The
+Assembly was engaged on the burning question of the government of the
+colonies. Were the negro slaves to be admitted to citizenship, or was a
+legislature of planters to be entrusted with the task of social
+reformation? Our own generation has seen in the republic of the West
+what strife this political difficulty is capable of raising. Barnave
+pronounced against the negroes. Robespierre, on the contrary, declaimed
+against any limitation of the right of the negro, as a compromise with
+the avarice, pride, and cruelty of a governing race, and a guilty
+trafficking with the rights of man. Barnave from that day saw that his
+laurel crown had gone to Robespierre.
+
+If the people 'called him noble that was now their hate, him vile that
+was their garland,' they did not transfer their affections without sound
+reason. Barnave's sensibility was too easily touched. There are many
+politicians in every epoch whose principles grow slack and flaccid at
+the approach of the golden sun of royalty. Barnave was one of those who
+was sent to bring back the fugitive King and Queen from Varennes, and
+the journey by their side in the coach unstrung his spirit. He became
+one of the court's clandestine advisers. Men of this weak susceptibility
+of imagination are not fit for times of revolution. To be on the side of
+the court was to betray the cause of the nation. We cannot take too much
+pains to realise that the voluntary conversion of Lewis the Sixteenth to
+a popular constitution and the abolition of feudalism, was practically
+as impossible as the conversion of Pope Pius the Ninth to the doctrine
+of a free church in a free state. Those who believe in the miracle of
+free will may think of this as they please. Sensible people who accept
+the scientific account of human character, know that the sudden
+transformation of a man or a woman brought up to middle age as the heir
+to centuries of absolutist tradition, into adherents of a government
+that agreed with the doctrines of Locke and Milton, was only possible on
+condition of supernatural interference. The King's good nature was no
+substitute for political capacity or insight. An instructive measure of
+the degree in which he possessed these two qualities may be found in
+that deplorable diary of his, where on such days as the Fourteenth of
+July, when the Bastille fell, and the Sixth of October, when he was
+carried in triumph from Versailles to the Tuileries, he made the simple
+entry, '_Rien_.' And he had no firmness. It was as difficult to keep the
+King to a purpose, La Marck said to Mirabeau, as to keep together a
+number of well-oiled ivory balls. Lewis, moreover, was guided by a more
+energetic and less compliant character than his own.
+
+Marie Antoinette's high mien in adversity, and the contrast between the
+dazzling splendour of her first years and the scenes of outrage and
+bloody death that made the climax of her fate, could not but strike the
+imaginations of men. Such contrasts are the very stuff of which Tragedy,
+the gorgeous muse with scepter'd pall, loves to weave her most imposing
+raiment. But history must be just; and the character of the Queen had
+far more concern in the disaster of the first five years of the
+Revolution than had the character of Robespierre. Every new document
+that comes to light heaps up proof that if blind and obstinate choice
+of personal gratification before the common weal be enough to constitute
+a state criminal, then the Queen of France was one of the worst state
+criminals that ever afflicted a nation. The popular hatred of Marie
+Antoinette sprang from a sound instinct. We shall never know how much or
+how little truth there was in those frightful charges against her, that
+may still be read in a thousand pamphlets. These imputed depravities far
+surpass anything that John Knox ever said against Mary Stuart, or that
+Juvenal has recorded against Messalina; and, perhaps, for the only
+parallel we must look to the hideous stories of the Byzantine secretary
+against Theodora, the too famous empress of Justinian and the persecutor
+of Belisarius. We have to remember that all the revolutionary portraits
+are distorted by furious passion, and that Marie Antoinette may no more
+deserve to be compared to Mary Stuart than Robespierre deserves to be
+compared to Ezzelino or to Alva. The aristocrats were the libellers, if
+libels they were. It is at least certain that, from the unlucky hour
+when the Austrian archduchess crossed the French frontier, a childish
+bride of fourteen, down to the hour when the Queen of France made the
+attempt to recross it in resentful flight one and twenty years
+afterwards, Marie Antoinette was ignorant, unteachable, blind to events
+and deaf to good counsels, a bitter grief to her heroic mother, the evil
+genius of her husband, the despair of her truest advisers, and an
+exceedingly bad friend to the people of France. When Burke had that
+immortal vision of her at Versailles--'just above the horizon,
+decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,
+glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendour and
+joy'--we know from the correspondence between Maria Theresa and her
+minister at Versailles, that what Burke really saw was no divinity, but
+a flighty and troublesome schoolgirl, an accomplice in all the ignoble
+intrigues, and a sharer of all the small busy passions, that convulse
+the insects of a court. The levity that came with her Lorraine blood,
+broke out in incredible dissipations; in indiscreet visits to the masked
+balls at the opera, in midnight parades and mystifications on the
+terrace at Versailles, in insensate gambling. 'The court of France is
+turned into a gaming-hell,' said the Emperor Joseph, the Queen's own
+brother: 'if they do not amend, the revolution will be cruel.' These
+vices or follies were less mischievous than her intervention in affairs
+of state. Here her levity was as marked as in the paltry affairs of the
+boudoir and the ante-chamber, and here to levity she added both
+dissimulation and vindictiveness. It was the Queen's influence that
+procured the dismissal of the two virtuous ministers by whose aid the
+King was striving to arrest the decay of the government of his kingdom.
+Malesherbes was distasteful to her for no better reason than that she
+wanted his post for some favourite's favourite. Against Turgot she
+conspired with tenacious animosity, because he had suppressed a
+sinecure which she designed for a court parasite, and because he would
+not support her caprice on behalf of a worthless creature of her
+faction. These two admirable men were disgraced on the same day. The
+Queen wrote to her mother that she had not meddled in the affair. This
+was a falsehood, for she had even sought to have Turgot thrown into the
+Bastille. 'I am as one dashed to the ground,' cried the great Voltaire,
+now nearing his end. 'Never can we console ourselves for having seen the
+golden age dawn and vanish. My eyes see only death in front of me, now
+that Turgot is gone. The rest of my days must be all bitterness.' What
+hope could there be that the personage who had thus put out the light of
+hope for France in 1776, would welcome that greater flame which was
+kindled in the land in 1789?
+
+When people write hymns of pity for the Queen, we always recall the poor
+woman whom Arthur Young met, as he was walking up a hill to ease his
+horse near Mars-le-Tour. Though the unfortunate creature was only
+twenty-eight, she might have been taken for sixty or seventy, her figure
+was so bent, her face so furrowed and hardened by toil. Her husband, she
+said, had a morsel of land, one cow, and a poor little horse, yet he had
+to pay forty-two pounds of wheat and three chickens to one Seigneur, and
+one hundred and sixty pounds of oats, one chicken, and one franc to
+another, besides very heavy tailles and other taxes; and they had seven
+children. She had heard that 'something was to be done by some great
+folks for such poor ones, but she did not know who nor how, but God send
+us better, for the tailles and the dues grind us to the earth.' It was
+such hapless drudges as this who replenished the Queen's gaming tables
+at Versailles. Thousands of them dragged on the burden of their harassed
+and desperate days, less like men and women than beasts of the field
+wrung and tortured and mercilessly overladen, in order that the Queen
+might gratify her childish passion for diamonds, or lavish money and
+estates on worthless female Polignacs and Lamballes, or kill time at a
+cost of five hundred louis a night at lansquenet and the faro bank. The
+Queen, it is true, was in all this no worse than other dissipated women
+then and since. She did not realise that it was the system to which she
+had stubbornly committed herself, that drove the people of the fields to
+cut their crops green to be baked in the oven, because their hunger
+could not wait; or made them cower whole days in their beds, because
+misery seemed to gnaw them there with a duller fang. That she was
+unconscious of its effect, makes no difference in the real drift of her
+policy; makes no difference in the judgment that we ought to pass upon
+it, nor in the gratitude that is owed to the stern men who rose up to
+consume her and her court with righteous flame. The Queen and the
+courtiers, and the hard-faring woman of Mars-le-Tour, and that whole
+generation, have long been dust and shadow; they have vanished from the
+earth, as if they were no more than the fire-flies that the peasant of
+the Italian poet saw dancing in the vineyard, as he took his evening
+rest on the hillside. They have all fled back into the impenetrable
+shade whence they came; our minds are free; and if social equity is not
+a chimera, Marie Antoinette was the protagonist of the most barbarous
+and execrable of causes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let us return to the shaping of the Constitution, not forgetting that
+its stability was to depend upon the Queen. Robespierre left some
+characteristic marks on the final arrangements. He imposed upon the
+Assembly a motion prohibiting any member of it from accepting office
+under the Crown for a period of four years after the dissolution.
+Robespierre from this time forth constantly illustrated a very singular
+truth; namely, that the most ostentatious faith in humanity in general
+seems always to beget the sharpest distrust of all human beings in
+particular. He proceeded further in the same direction. It was
+Robespierre who persuaded the Chamber to pass a self-denying ordinance.
+All its members were declared ineligible for a seat in the legislature
+that was to replace them. The members of the Right on this occasion went
+with their bitter foes of the Extreme Left, and to both parties have
+been imputed sinister and Machiavellian motives. The Right, aware that
+their own return to the new Assembly was impossible, were delighted to
+reduce the men with whom they had been carrying on incensed battle for
+two long years, to their own obscurity and impotence. Robespierre, on
+the other hand, is accused of a jealous desire to exclude Barnave from
+power. He is accused also of a deliberate intention to weaken the new
+legislature, in order to secure the preponderance of the Parisian clubs.
+There is no evidence that these malignant feelings were in Robespierre's
+mind. The reasons he gave were exactly of the kind that we should have
+expected to weigh with a man of his stamp. There is even a certain truth
+in them, that is not inconsistent with the experience of a parliamentary
+country like our own. To talk, he said, of the transmission of light and
+experience from one assembly to another, was to distrust the public
+spirit. The influence of opinion and the general good grows less, as the
+influence of parliamentary orators grows greater. He had no taste, he
+proceeded with one of his chilly sneers, for that new science which was
+styled the tactics of great assemblies; it was too like intrigue.
+Nothing but truth and reason ought to reign in a legislature. He did not
+like the idea of clever men becoming dominant by skilful tactics, and
+then perpetuating their empire from one assembly to another. He wound up
+his discourse with some theatrical talk about disinterestedness. When he
+sat down, he was greeted with enthusiastic acclamations, such as a few
+months before used to greet the stormful Mirabeau, now wrapped in
+eternal sleep amid the stillness of the new Pantheon. The folly of
+Robespierre's inferences is obvious enough. If only truth and reason
+ought to weigh in a legislature, then it is all the more important not
+to exclude any body of men through whom truth and reason may possibly
+enter. Robespierre had striven hard to remove all restrictions from
+admission to the electoral franchise. He did not see that to limit the
+choice of candidates was in itself the most grievous of all
+restrictions.
+
+The common view has been that the Constitution of 1791 perished because
+its creators were thus disabled from defending the work of their hands.
+This view led to a grave mistake four years later, after Robespierre had
+gone to his grave. The Convention, framing the Constitution of the Year
+III., decided that two-thirds of the existing assembly should keep their
+places, and that only one-third should be popularly elected. This led to
+the revolt of the Thirteenth Vendemiaire, and afterwards to the coup
+d'etat of the Eighteenth Fructidor. In that sense, no doubt,
+Robespierre's proposal was the indirect root of much mischief. But it is
+childish to believe that if a hundred of the most prominent members of
+the Constituent had found seats in the new assembly, they would have
+saved the Constitution. Their experience, the loss of which it is the
+fashion to deplore, could have had no application to the strange
+combinations of untoward circumstance that were now rising up with such
+deadly rapidity in every quarter of the horizon, like vast sombre banks
+of impenetrable cloud. Prudence in new cases, as has been somewhere
+said, can do nothing on grounds of retrospect. The work of the
+Constituent was doomed by the very nature of things. Their assumption
+that the Revolution was made, while all France was still torn by fierce
+and unappeasable disputes as to seignorial rights, was one of the most
+striking pieces of self-deception in history. It is told how in the
+eleventh century, when the fervent hosts of the Crusaders tramped across
+Europe on their way to deliver the Holy City from the hands of the
+unbelievers, the wearied children, as they espied each new town that lay
+in their interminable march, cried out with joyful expectation, 'Is not
+this, then, Jerusalem?' So France had set out on a portentous journey,
+little knowing how far off was the end; lightly taking each poor
+halting-place for the deeply longed-for goal; and waxing more fiercely
+disappointed, as each new height that they gained only disclosed yet
+farther and more unattainable horizons. 'Alas,' said Burke, 'they little
+know how many a weary step is to be taken, before they can form
+themselves into a mass which has a true political personality.'
+
+An immense revolution had been effected, but by what force were its
+fruits to be guarded? Each step in the revolution had raised a host of
+irreconcilable enemies. The rights of property, the old and jealous
+associations of local independence, the traditions of personal dignity,
+the relations of the civil to the spiritual power--these were the
+momentous matters about which the lawmakers of the Constituent had
+exercised themselves. The parties of the Chamber had for these two
+years past been laying mine and countermine among the very deepest
+foundations of society. One by one each great corporation of the old
+order had been alienated from the new order. It was inevitable that it
+should be so. Let us look at one or two examples of this. The monarchy
+had imposed administrative centralisation upon France without securing
+national unity. Thus the great provinces that had been slowly added one
+after the other to the monarchy, while becoming members of the same
+kingdom, still retained different institutions and isolated usages. The
+time was now come when France should be France, and its inhabitants
+Frenchmen, and no longer Bretons, Normans, Gascons, Provencals. The
+Assembly by a single decree (1790) redivided the country into
+eighty-three departments. It wiped out at a stroke the separate
+administrations, the separate parlements, the peculiar privileges, and
+even the historic names of the old provinces. We need not dwell on the
+significance of this change here, but will only remark in passing that
+the stubborn disputes from the time of the Regency downwards between the
+Crown and the provincial parlements turned, under other names and in
+other forms, upon this very issue of the unification of the law. The
+Crown was with the progressive party, but it lacked the strength and
+courage to set aside retrograde local sentiment as the Constituent
+Assembly was able to set it aside.
+
+Then this prodigious change in the distribution of government was
+accompanied by no less prodigious a change in the source of power.
+Popular election replaced the old system of territorial privilege and
+aristocratic prerogative. The effect of this vital innovation, followed
+as it was a few months later by a decree abolishing titles and armorial
+bearings, was to complete the estrangement of the old privileged classes
+from the revolutionary movement. All that they had meant to concede was
+the payment of an equal land tax. What was life worth to the noble, if
+common people were to be allowed to wear arms and to command a company
+of foot or a troop of horse; if he was no longer to have thousands of
+acres left waste for the chase; if he was compelled to sue for a vote
+where he had only yesterday reigned as manorial lord; if, in short, he
+was at a stroke to lose all those delights of insolence and vanity which
+had made, not the decoration, but the very substance, of his days?
+
+Nor were the nobles of the sword and the red-heeled slipper the only
+outraged class. The magistracy of the provincial parliaments were
+inflamed with resentment against changes that stripped them of the power
+of exciting against the new government the same factious and
+impracticable spirit with which they had on so many occasions
+embarrassed the old. The clergy were thrown even still more violently
+into opposition. The Assembly, sorely pressed for resources, declared
+the property held by ecclesiastics, amounting to a revenue of not less
+than eight million pounds sterling a year, or double that amount in
+modern values, to be the property of the nation. Talleyrand carried a
+measure decreeing the sale of the ecclesiastical domain. The clergy were
+as intensely irritated as laymen would have been by a similar assertion
+of sovereign right. And their irritation was made still more dangerous
+by the next set of measures against them.
+
+The Assembly withdrew all recognition of Catholicism as the religion of
+the State; monastic vows were abolished, and orders and congregations
+suppressed; the ecclesiastical divisions were made to coincide with the
+civil divisions, a bishop being allotted to each department. What was a
+more important revolution than all, bishops and incumbents were
+henceforth to be appointed by popular election. The Assembly, who had
+always the institutions of our own country before them, meant to
+introduce into France the system of the Church of England, which was
+even then an anachronism in the land of its birth; much worse was such a
+system an anachronism, after belief had been sapped by a Voltaire and an
+Encyclopaedia. The clergy both showed and excited a mutinous spirit. The
+Assembly, by way of retort, decreed that all ecclesiastics should take
+the oath of allegiance to the civil constitution of the clergy, on pain
+of forfeiture of their benefices. Five-sixths of the clergy refused, and
+the result was an outbreak of religious fury in the great towns of the
+south and elsewhere, which recalled the violence of the sixteenth
+century and the Reformation.
+
+Thus when the Constituent Assembly ceased from its labours, the popular
+party had to face the mocking and defiant privileged classes; the
+magistracy, whose craft and calling were gone; and the clergy and as
+many of the flocks as shared the holy vindictiveness of their pastors.
+Immense material improvements had been made, but who was to guard them
+against all these powerful and exasperated bands? No chamber could
+execute so portentous an office, least of all a chamber that was bound
+to work in accord with a King, who at the very moment when he was
+swearing fidelity to the new order of things, was sending entreaties to
+the King of Prussia and to the Emperor, his brother-in-law, to overthrow
+the new order and bring back the old. If the Revolution had achieved
+priceless gains for France, they could only be preserved on condition
+that public action was directed by those who valued these gains for
+themselves and for their children above all things else--above the
+monarchy, above the constitution, above peace, above their own sorry
+lives. There was only one party who showed this passionate devotion,
+this fanatical resolution not to suffer the work that had been done to
+be undone, and never to allow France to sink back from exalted national
+life into the lethargy of national death. That party was the Jacobins,
+and, above all, the austere and rigorous Jacobins of Paris. On their
+ascendancy depended the triumph of the Revolution, and on the triumph of
+the Revolution depended the salvation of France. Their ascendancy meant
+a Jacobin dictatorship, and against this, as against dictatorship in all
+its forms, many things have been said, and truly said. But the one most
+important thing that can be said about Jacobin dictatorship is that, in
+spite of all the dolorous mishaps and hateful misdeeds that marked its
+course, it was still the only instrument capable of concentrating and
+utilising the dispersed social energy of the French people. The crisis
+was not a crisis of logic but of force, and the Jacobins alone
+understood, as the old Covenanters had understood, that problems of
+force are not solved by phrases, but by mastery and the sword.
+
+The great popular club of Paris was the centre of all those who looked
+at events in this spirit. The Legislative Assembly, the successor of the
+Constituent, met in the month of October 1791. Like its predecessor, the
+Legislative contained a host of excellent and patriotic men, and they at
+once applied themselves to the all-important task, which the Constituent
+had left so deplorably incomplete, of finally breaking down the old
+feudal rights. The most important group in the new chamber were the
+deputies from the Gironde. Events soon revealed violent dissents between
+the Girondins and the Jacobins, but, for some months after the meeting
+of the Legislative, Girondins and Jacobins represented together in
+unbroken unity the great popular party. From this time until the fall of
+the monarchy, the whole of this popular party in all its branches found
+their rallying-place, not in the Assembly, but in the Jacobin Club; and
+the ascendancy of the Jacobin Club embodied the dictatorship of Paris.
+It was only from Paris that the whole circle of events could be
+commanded. When the peasants had got what they wanted, that is to say
+the emancipation of the land, they were ready to think that the
+Revolution was in safety and at an end. They were in no position to see
+the enmity of the exiles, the dangerous selfishness of Austria and
+Prussia, the disloyal machinations of the court, the reactionary
+sentiment of La Vendee, the absolute unworkableness of the new
+constitution. Arthur Young, in the height of the agitations of the
+Constituent Assembly, found himself at Moulins, the capital of the
+Bourbonnais, and on the great post-road to Italy. He went to the best
+coffee-house in the town, and found as many as twenty tables spread for
+company, but as for a newspaper, he says he might as well have asked for
+an elephant. In the capital of a great province, the seat of an
+intendant, at a moment like that, with a National Assembly voting a
+revolution, and not a newspaper to tell the people whether Fayette,
+Mirabeau, or Lewis XVI. were on the throne! Could such a people as this,
+he cries, ever have made a revolution or become free? 'Never in a
+thousand centuries: the enlightened mob of Paris have done the whole.'
+And that was the plain truth. What was involved in such a truth, we
+shall see presently.
+
+Robespierre had now risen to be one of the foremost men in France. To
+borrow the figure of an older chief of French faction, from trifling
+among the violins in the orchestra, he had ascended to the stage itself,
+and had a right to perform leading parts. Disqualified for sitting in
+the Assembly, he wielded greater power than ever in the Club. The
+Constituent had been full of his enemies. 'Alone with my own soul,' he
+once cried to the Jacobins, 'how could I have borne struggles that were
+beyond any human strength, if I had not raised my spirit to God?' This
+isolation marked him with a kind of theocratic distinction. These
+communings with the unseen powers gave a certain indefinable prerogative
+to a man, even among the children of the century of Voltaire. Condorcet,
+the youngest of the intimates and disciples of Voltaire, of D'Alembert,
+of Turgot, was the first to sound bitter warning that Robespierre was at
+heart a priest. The suggestion was more than a gibe. Robespierre had the
+typic sacerdotal temperament, its sense of personal importance, its thin
+unction, its private leanings to the stake and the cord; and he had one
+of those deplorable natures that seem as if they had never in their
+lives known the careless joys of a springtime. By and by, from mere
+priest he developed into the deadlier carnivore, the Inquisitor.
+
+The absence of advantages of bodily presence has never been fatal to the
+pretensions of the pontiff. Robespierre was only a couple of inches
+above five feet in height, but the Grand Monarch himself was hardly
+more. His eyes were small and weak, and he usually wore spectacles; his
+face was pitted by the marks of small-pox; his complexion was dull and
+sometimes livid; the tones of his voice were dry and shrill; and he
+spoke with the vulgar accent of his province. Such is the accepted
+tradition, and there is no reason to dissent from it. It is fair,
+however, to remember that Robespierre's enemies had command of his
+historic reputation at its source, and this is always a great advantage
+for faction, if not for truth. So Robespierre's voice and person may
+have been maligned, just as Aristophanes may have been a calumniator
+when he accused Cleon of having an intolerably loud voice and smelling
+of the tanyard. What is certain is that Robespierre was a master of
+effective oratory adapted for a violent popular audience, to impress, to
+persuade, and to command. The Convention would have yawned, if it had
+not trembled under him, but the Jacobin Club never found him tedious.
+Robespierre's style had no richness either of feeling or of phrase; no
+fervid originality, no happy violences. If we turn from a page of
+Rousseau to a page of Robespierre, we feel that the disciple has none of
+the thrilling sonorousness of the master; the glow and the ardour have
+become metallic; the long-drawn plangency is parodied by shrill notes of
+splenetic complaint. The rhythm has no broad wings; the phrases have no
+quality of radiance; the oratorical glimpses never lift the spirit into
+new worlds. We are never conscious of those great pulses of strong
+emotion that shake and vibrate through the nobly-measured periods of
+Cicero or Bossuet or Burke. Robespierre could not rival the vivid and
+highly-coloured declamation of Vergniaud; his speeches were never heated
+with the ardent passion that poured like a torrent of fire through some
+of the orations of Isnard; nor, above all, had he any mastery of that
+dialect of the Titans, by which Danton convulsed an audience with fear,
+with amazement, or with the spirit of defiant endeavour. The absence of
+these intenser qualities did not make Robespierre's speeches less
+effective for their own purpose. On the contrary, when the air has
+become torrid, and passionate utterance is cheap, then severity in form
+is very likely to pass for good sense in substance. That Robespierre had
+decent fluency, copiousness, and finish, need hardly be said. The French
+have an artistic sense; they have never accepted our own whimsical
+doctrine, that a man's politics must be sagacious, if his speaking is
+only clumsy enough. Robespierre more than once showed himself ready with
+a forcible reply on critical occasions: this only makes him an
+illustration the more of the good oratorical rule, that he is most
+likely to come well out of the emergency of an improvisation, who is
+usually most careful to prepare. Robespierre was as solicitous about the
+correctness of his speech, as he was about the neatness of his clothes;
+he no more grudged the pains given to the polishing of his discourses
+than he grudged the time given every day to the powdering of his hair.
+
+Nothing was more remarkable than his dexterity in presenting his case.
+James Mill used to point out to his son among other skilful arts of
+Demosthenes, these two: first, that he said everything important to his
+purpose at the exact moment when he had brought the minds of his hearers
+into the state most fitted to receive it; second, that he insinuated
+gradually and indirectly into their minds ideas which would have roused
+opposition if they had been expressed more directly. Mr. Mill once
+called the attention of the present writer to exactly the same kind of
+rhetorical skill in the speeches of Robespierre. The reader may do well
+to turn, for excellent specimens of this, to the speech of January 11,
+1792, against the war, or that of May 1794 against atheism. The logic is
+stringent, but the premises are arbitrary. Robespierre is as one who
+should iterate indisputable propositions of abstract geometry and
+mechanics, while men are craving an architect who shall bridge the gulf
+of waters. Exuberance of high words no longer conceals the sterility of
+his ideas and the shallowness of his method. We should say of his
+speeches, as of so much of the speaking and writing of the time, that it
+is transparent and smooth, but there is none of that quality which the
+critics of painting call Texture.
+
+His listeners, however, in the old refectory of the Convent of the
+Jacobins took little heed of these things; the matter was too absorbing,
+the issue too vital. A hundred years before, the hunted Covenanters of
+the Western Lowlands, with Claverhouse's dragoons a few miles off,
+exulted in the endless exhortations and expositions of their hill
+preachers: they relished nothing so keenly as three hours of
+Mucklewrath, followed by three hours more of Peter Poundtext. We now
+find the jargon of the Mucklewraths and the Poundtexts of the Solemn
+League and Covenant, dead as it is, still not devoid of the picturesque
+and the impressive. If we cannot say the same of the great preacher of
+the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the reason is partly that time has
+not yet softened the tones, and partly that there is no one in all the
+world with whom it is so difficult to sympathise, as with the narrower
+fanatics of our own particular faith.
+
+We have still to mark the trait that above everything else gave to
+Robespierre the trust and confidence of Paris. As men listened to him,
+they had full faith in the integrity of the speaker. And Robespierre in
+one way deserved this confidence. He was eminently the possessor of a
+conscience. When the strain of circumstance in the last few months of
+his life pressed him towards wrong, at least before doing wrong he was
+forced to lie to his own conscience. This is a kind of honesty, as the
+world goes. In the Salon of 1791 an artist exhibited Robespierre's
+portrait, simply inscribing it, _The Incorruptible_. Throngs passed
+before it every day, and ratified the honourable designation by eager
+murmurs of approval. The democratic journals were loud in panegyric on
+the unsleeping sentinel of liberty. They loved to speak of him as the
+modern Fabricius, and delighted to recall the words of Pyrrhus, that it
+is easier to turn the sun from its course, than to turn Fabricius from
+the path of honour. Patriotic parents eagerly besought him to be sponsor
+for their children. Ladies of wealth, including at least one
+countrywoman of our own, vainly entreated him to accept their purses,
+for women are quick to recognise the temperament of the priest, and
+recognising they adore. A rich widow of Nantes besought him with
+pertinacious tenderness to accept not only her purse but her hand.
+Mirabeau's sister hailed him as an eagle floating through the blue
+heavens.
+
+Robespierre's life was frugal and simple, as must always be seemly in
+the spokesman of the dumb multitude whose lives are very hard. He had a
+single room in the house of Duplay, at the extreme west end of the long
+Rue Saint Honore, half a mile from the Jacobin Club, and less than that
+from the Riding School of the Tuileries, where the Constituent and
+Legislative Assemblies held session. His room, which served him for
+bed-chamber as well as for the uses of the day, was scantily furnished,
+and he shared the homely fare of his host. Duplay was a carpenter, a
+sworn follower of Robespierre, and the whole family cherished their
+guest as if he had been a son and a brother. Between him and the eldest
+daughter of the house there grew up a more tender sentiment, and
+Robespierre looked forward to the joys of the hearth, so soon as his
+country should be delivered from the oppressors without and the traitors
+within.
+
+Eagerly as Robespierre delighted in his popularity, he intended it to
+be a force and not a decoration. An occasion of testing his influence
+arose in the winter of 1791. The situation had become more and more
+difficult. The court was more disloyal and more perverse, as its hopes
+that the nightmare would come to an end became fainter. In the summer of
+1791, the German Emperor, the King of Prussia, and minor champions of
+retrograde causes issued the famous Declaration of Pilnitz. The menace
+of intervention was the one element needed to make the position of the
+monarchy desperate. It roused France to fever heat. For along with the
+foreign kings were the French princes of the blood and the French
+nobles. In the spring of 1792, the Assembly forced the King to declare
+war against Austria. Robespierre, in spite of the strong tide of warlike
+feeling, led the Jacobin opposition to the war. This is one of the most
+sagacious acts of his career, for the hazards of the conflict were
+terrible. If the foreigners and the emigrant nobles were victorious, all
+that the Revolution had won would be instantly and irretrievably lost.
+If, on the other hand, the French armies were victorious, one of two
+disasters might follow. Either the troops might become a weapon in the
+hands of the court and the reactionary party, for the suppression of all
+the progressive parties alike; or else their general might make himself
+supreme. Robespierre divined, what the Girondins did not, that Narbonne
+and the court, in accepting the cry for war, were secretly designing,
+first, to crush the faction of emigrant nobles, then to make the King
+popular at home, and thus finally to construct a strong royalist army.
+The Constitutional party in the Legislative Assembly had the same ideas
+as Narbonne. The Girondins sought war; first, from a genuine, if not a
+profoundly wise, enthusiasm for liberty, which they would fain have
+spread all over the world; and next, because they thought that war would
+increase their popularity, and give them decisive control of the
+situation.
+
+The first effect of the war declared in April 1792 was to shake down the
+throne. Operations had no sooner begun than the King became an object of
+bitter and amply warranted suspicion. Neither the leaders nor the people
+had forgotten his flight a year before to place himself at the head of
+the foreign invaders, nor the letter that he had left behind him for the
+National Assembly, protesting against all that had been done. They were
+again reminded of what short shrift they might expect if the King's
+friends should come back. The Duke of Brunswick at the head of the
+foreign army set out on his march, and issued his famous proclamation to
+the inhabitants of France. He demanded immediate and unconditional
+submission; he threatened with fire and sword every town, village, or
+hamlet, that should dare to defend itself; and finally, he swore that if
+the smallest violence or insult were done to the King or his family, the
+city of Paris should be handed over to military execution and absolute
+destruction. This insensate document bears marks in every line of the
+implacable hate and burning thirst for revenge that consumed the
+aristocratic refugees. Only civil war can awaken such rage as
+Brunswick's manifesto betrayed. It was drawn up by the French nobles at
+Coblenz. He merely signed it. The reply to it was the memorable
+insurrection of the Tenth of August 1792. The King was thrown into
+prison, and the Legislative Assembly made way for the National
+Convention.
+
+Robespierre's part in the great rising of August was only secondary.
+Only a few weeks before he had started a journal and written articles in
+a constitutional sense. M. d'Hericault believes a story that
+Robespierre's aim in this had been to have himself accepted as tutor for
+the young Dauphin. It is impossible to prove a negative, but we find
+great difficulty in believing that such a post could ever have been an
+object of Robespierre's ambition. Now and always he showed a rather
+singular preference for the substance of power over its glitter. He was
+vain and an egoist, but in spite of this, and in spite of his passion
+for empty phrases, he was not without a sense of reality.
+
+The insurrection of the 10th of August, however, was the idea, not of
+Robespierre, but of a more commanding personage, who now became one of
+the foremost of the Jacobin chiefs. De Maistre, that ardent champion of
+reaction, found a striking argument for the presence of the divine hand
+in the Revolution, in the intense mediocrity of the revolutionary
+leaders. How could such men, he asked, have achieved such results, if
+they had not been instruments of the directing will of heaven? Danton at
+any rate is above this caustic criticism. Danton was of the Herculean
+type of a Luther, though without Luther's deep vision of spiritual
+things; or a Chatham, though without Chatham's august majesty of life;
+or a Cromwell, though without Cromwell's calm steadfastness of patriotic
+purpose. His visage and port seemed to declare his character: dark
+overhanging brows; eyes that had the gleam of lightning; a savage mouth;
+an immense head; the voice of a Stentor. Madame Roland pictured him as a
+fiercer Sardanapalus. Artists called him Jove the Thunderer. His enemies
+saw in him the Satan of the Paradise Lost. He was no moral regenerator;
+the difference between him and Robespierre is typified in Danton's
+version of an old saying, that he who hates vices hates men. He was not
+free from that careless life-contemning desperation, which sometimes
+belongs to forcible natures. Danton cannot be called noble, because
+nobility implies a purity, an elevation, and a kind of seriousness which
+were not his. He was too heedless of his good name, and too blind to the
+truth that though right and wrong may be near neighbours, yet the line
+that separates them is of an awful sacredness. If Robespierre passed for
+a hypocrite by reason of his scruple, Danton seemed a desperado by his
+airs of 'immoral thoughtlessness.' But the world forgives much to a
+royal size, and Danton was one of the men who strike deep notes. He had
+that largeness of motive, fulness of nature, and capaciousness of mind,
+which will always redeem a multitude of infirmities.
+
+Though the author of some of the most tremendous and far-sounding
+phrases of an epoch that was only too rich in them, yet phrases had no
+empire over him; he was their master, not their dupe. Of all the men who
+succeeded Mirabeau as directors of the unchained forces, we feel that
+Danton alone was in his true element. Action, which poisoned the blood
+of such men as Robespierre, and drove such men as Vergniaud out of their
+senses with exaltation, was to Danton his native sphere. When France was
+for a moment discouraged, it was he who nerved her to new effort by the
+electrifying cry, '_We must dare, and again dare, and without end
+dare!_' If his rivals or his friends seemed too intent on trifles, too
+apt to confound side issues with the central aim of the battle, Danton
+was ever ready to urge them to take a juster measure:--'_When the
+edifice is all ablaze, I take little heed of the knaves who are
+pilfering the household goods; I rush to put out the flames._' When base
+egoism was compromising a cause more priceless than the personality of
+any man, it was Danton who made them ashamed by the soul-inspiring
+exclamation, '_Let my name be blotted out and my memory perish, if only
+France may be free._' The Girondins denounced the popular clubs of Paris
+as hives of lawlessness and outrage. Danton warned them that it were
+wiser to go to these seething societies and to guide them, than to waste
+breath in futile denunciation. 'A nation in revolution,' he cried to
+them, in a superb figure, 'is like the bronze boiling and foaming and
+purifying itself in the cauldron. Not yet is the statue of Liberty cast.
+Fiercely boils the metal; have an eye on the furnace, or the flame will
+surely scorch you.' If there was murderous work below the hatches, that
+was all the more reason why the steersman should keep his hand strong
+and ready on the wheel, with an eye quick for each new drift in the
+hurricane, and each new set in the raging currents. This is ever the
+figure under which one conceives Danton--a Titanic shape doing battle
+with the fury of the seas, yielding while flood upon flood sweeps wildly
+over him, and then with unshaken foothold and undaunted front once more
+surveying the waste of waters, and striving with dexterous energy to
+force the straining vessel over the waters of the bar.
+
+La Fayette had called the huge giant of popular force from its squalid
+lurking-places, and now he trembled before its presence, and fled from
+it shrieking, with averted hands. Marat thrust swords into the giant's
+half-unwilling grasp, and plied him with bloody incitement to slay hip
+and thigh, and so filled the land with a horror that has not faded from
+out of men's minds to this day. Danton instantly discerned that the
+problem was to preserve revolutionary energy, and still to persuade the
+insurgent forces to retire once more within their boundaries.
+Robespierre discerned this too, but he was paralysed and bewildered by
+his own principles, as the convinced doctrinaire is so apt to be amid
+the perplexities of practice. The teaching of Rousseau was ever pouring
+like thin smoke among his ideas, and clouding his view of actual
+conditions. The Tenth of August produced a considerable change in
+Robespierre's point of view. It awoke him to the precipitous steepness
+of the slope down which the revolutionary car was rushing headlong. His
+faith in the infallibility of the people suffered no shock, but he was
+in a moment alive to the need of walking warily, and his whole march
+from now until the end, twenty-three months later, became timorous,
+cunning, and oblique. His intelligence seemed to move in subterranean
+tunnels, with the gleam of an equivocal premiss at one end, and the mist
+of a vague conclusion at the other.
+
+The enthusiastic pedant, with his narrow understanding, his thin purism,
+and his idyllic sentimentalism, found that the summoning archangel of
+his paradise proved to be a ruffian with a pike. The shock must have
+been tremendous. Robespierre did not quail nor retreat; he only revised
+his notion of the situation. A curious interview once took place between
+him and Marat. Robespierre began by assuring the Friend of the People
+that he quite understood the atrocious demands for blood with which the
+columns of Marat's newspaper were filled, to be merely useful
+exaggerations of his real designs. Marat repelled the disparaging
+imputation of clemency and common sense, and talked in his familiar vein
+of poniarding brigands, burning despots alive in their palaces, and
+impaling the traitors of the Assembly on their own benches.
+'Robespierre,' says Marat, 'listened to me with affright; he turned pale
+and said nothing. The interview confirmed the opinion I had always had
+of him, that he united the integrity of a thoroughly honest man and the
+zeal of a good patriot, with the enlightenment of a wise senator, but
+that he was without either the views or the audacity of a real
+statesman.' The picture is instructive, for it shows us Robespierre's
+invariable habit of leaving violence and iniquity unrebuked; of
+conciliating the practitioners of violence and iniquity; and of
+contenting himself with an inward hope of turning the world into a right
+course by fine words. He had no audacity in Marat's sense, but he was no
+coward. He knew, as all these men knew, that almost from hour to hour he
+carried his life in his hand, yet he declined to seek shelter in the
+obscurity which saved such men as Sieyes. But if he had courage, he had
+not the initiative of a man of action. He invented none of the ideas or
+methods of the Revolution, not even the Reign of Terror, but he was very
+dexterous in accepting or appropriating what more audacious spirits than
+himself had devised and enforced. The pedant, cursed with the ambition
+to be a ruler of men, is a curious study. He would be glad not to go too
+far, and yet his chief dread is lest he be left behind. His
+consciousness of pure aims allows him to become an accomplice in the
+worst crimes. Suspecting himself at bottom to be a theorist, he hastens
+to clear his character as man of practice by conniving at an enormity.
+Thus, in September 1792, a band of miscreants committed the grievous
+massacres in the prisons of Paris. Robespierre, though the best evidence
+goes to show that he not only did not abet the prison murders, but in
+his heart deplored them, yet after the event did not scruple to justify
+what had been done. This was the beginning of a long course of
+compliance with sanguinary misdeeds, for which Robespierre has been as
+hotly execrated as if he prompted them. We do not, for the moment,
+measure the relative degrees of guilt that attached to mere compliance
+on the one hand, and cruel origination on the other. But his position in
+the Revolution is not rightly understood, unless we recognise him as
+being in almost every case an accessory after the fact.
+
+Between the fall of Lewis in 1792 and the fall of Robespierre in 1794,
+France was the scene of two main series of events. One set comprises the
+repulse of the invaders, the suppression of an extensive civil war, and
+the attempted reconstruction of a social framework. The other comprises
+the rapid phases of an internecine struggle of violent and short-lived
+factions. By an unhappy fatality, due partly to anti-democratic
+prejudice, and partly to men's unfailing passion for melodrama, the
+Reign of Terror has been popularly taken for the central and most
+important part of the revolutionary epic. This is nearly as absurd as it
+would be to make Gustave Flourens' manifestation of the Fifth of
+October, or the rising of the Thirty-first of October, the most
+prominent features in a history of the war of French defence in our own
+day. In truth, the Terror was a mere episode; and just as the rising of
+October 1870 was due to Marshal Bazaine's capitulation at Metz, it is
+easy to see that, with one exception, every violent movement in Paris,
+from 1792 to 1794, was due to menace or disaster on the frontier. Every
+one of the famous days of Paris was an answer to some enemy without. The
+storm of the Tuileries on the Tenth of August, as we have already said,
+was the response to Brunswick's proclamation. The bloody days of
+September were the reaction of panic at the capture of Longwy and Verdun
+by the Prussians. The surrender of Cambrai provoked the execution of
+Marie Antoinette. The defeat of Aix-la-Chapelle produced the abortive
+insurrection of the Tenth of March; and the treason of Dumouriez, the
+reverses of Custine, and the rebellion in La Vendee, produced the
+effectual insurrection of the Thirty-first of May 1793. The last of
+these two risings of Paris, headed by the Commune, against the
+Convention which was until then controlled by the Girondins, at length
+gave the government of France and the defence of the Revolution
+definitely over to the Jacobins. Their patriotic dictatorship lasted
+unbroken for a short period of ten months, and then the great party
+broke up into factions. The splendid triumphs of the dictatorship have
+been, in England at any rate, too usually forgotten, and only the crimes
+of the factions remembered. Robespierre's history unfortunately belongs
+to the less important battle.
+
+
+II
+
+The Girondins were driven out of the Convention by the insurgent
+Parisians at the beginning of June 1793. The movement may be roughly
+compared to that of the Independents in our own Rebellion, when the army
+compelled the withdrawal of eleven of the Presbyterian leaders from the
+parliament; or, it may recall Pride's memorable Purge of the same famous
+assembly. Both cases illustrate the common truth that large deliberative
+bodies, be they never so excellent for purposes of legislation, and even
+for a general control of the executive government in ordinary times, are
+found to be essentially unfit for directing a military crisis. If there
+are any historic examples that at first seem to contradict such a
+proposition, it will be found that the bodies in question were close
+aristocracies, like the Great Council of Venice, or the Senate of Rome
+in the strong days of the Commonwealth; they were never the creatures of
+popular election, with varying aims and a diversified political spirit.
+Modern publicists have substituted the divine right of assemblies for
+the old divine right of monarchies. Those who condone the violence done
+to the King on the Tenth of August, and even acquiesce in his execution
+five months afterwards, are relentless against the violence done to the
+Convention on the Thirty-first of May. We confess ourselves unable to
+follow this transfer of the superstition of sacrosanctity from a king to
+a chamber. No doubt, the sooner a nation acquires a settled government,
+the better for it, provided the government be efficient. But if it be
+not efficient, the mischief of actively suppressing it may well be fully
+outweighed by the mischief of retaining it. We have no wish to smooth
+over the perversities of a revolutionary time; they cost a nation very
+dear; but if all the elements of the state are in furious convulsion and
+uncontrollable effervescence, then it is childish to measure the march
+of events by the standard of happier days of social peace and political
+order. The prospect before France at the violent close of Girondin
+supremacy was as formidable as any nation has ever yet had to confront
+in the history of the world. Rome was not more critically placed when
+the defeat of Varro on the plain of Cannae had broken up her alliances
+and ruined her army. The brave patriots of the Netherlands had no
+gloomier outlook at that dolorous moment when the Prince of Orange had
+left them, and Alva had been appointed to bring them back by rapine,
+conflagration, and murder, under the loathed yoke of the Spanish tyrant.
+
+Let us realise the conditions that Robespierre and Danton and the other
+Jacobin leaders had now to face. In the north-west one division of the
+fugitive Girondins was forming an army at Caen; in the south-west
+another division was doing the same at Bordeaux. Marseilles and Lyons
+were rallying all the disaffected and reactionary elements in the
+south-east. La Vendee had flamed out in wild rebellion for Church and
+King. The strong places on the north frontier, and the strong places on
+the east, were in the hands of the foreign enemy. The fate of the
+Revolution lay in the issue of a struggle between Paris, with less than
+a score of departments on her side, and all the rest of France and the
+whole European coalition marshalled against her. And even this was not
+the worst. In Paris itself a very considerable proportion of its
+half-million of inhabitants were disaffected to the revolutionary cause.
+Reactionary historians dwell on the fact that such risings as that of
+the Tenth of August were devised by no more than half of the sections
+into which Paris was divided. It was common, they say, for half a dozen
+individuals to take upon themselves to represent the fourteen or fifteen
+hundred other members of a section. But what better proof can we have
+that if France was to be delivered from restored feudalism and foreign
+spoliation, the momentous task must be performed by those who had sense
+to discern the awful peril, and energy to encounter it?
+
+The Girondins had made their incapacity plain. The execution of the King
+had filled them with alarm, and with hatred against the ruder and more
+robust party who had forced that startling act of vengeance upon them.
+Puny social disgusts prevented them from co-operating with Danton or
+with Robespierre. Prussia and Austria were not more redoubtable or more
+hateful to them than was Paris, and they wasted, in futile
+recriminations about the September massacres or the alleged peculations
+of municipal officers, the time and the energy that should have been
+devoted without let or interruption to the settlement of the
+administration and the repulse of the foe. It is impossible to think of
+such fine characters as Vergniaud or Madame Roland without admiration,
+or of their untimely fate without pity. But the deliverance of a people
+beset by strong and implacable enemies could not wait on mere good
+manners and fastidious sentiments, when these comely things were in
+company with the most stupendous want of foresight ever shown by a
+political party. How can we measure the folly of men who so missed the
+conditions of the problem as to cry out in the Convention itself, almost
+within earshot of the Jacobin Club, that if any insult were offered to
+the national representation, the departments would rise, 'Paris would be
+annihilated; and men would come to search on the banks of the Seine
+whether such a city had ever existed!' It was to no purpose that Danton
+urgently rebuked the senseless animosity with which the Right poured
+incessant malediction on the Left, and the wild shrieking hate with
+which the Left retaliated on the Right. The battle was to the death, and
+it was the Girondins who first menaced their political foes with
+vengeance and the guillotine. As it happened, the treason of Dumouriez
+and their own ineptitude destroyed them before revenge was within reach.
+Such a consummation was fortunate for their country. It was the
+Girondins whose want of union and energy had by the middle of 1793
+brought France to distraction and imminent ruin. It was a short year of
+Jacobin government that by the summer of 1794 had welded the nation
+together again, and finally conquered the invasion. The city of the
+Seine had once more shown itself what it had been for nine centuries,
+ever since the days of Odo, Count of Paris and first King of the French,
+not merely a capital, but France itself, 'its living heart and surest
+bulwark.'
+
+The immediate instrument of so rapid and extraordinary an achievement
+was the Committee of Public Safety. The French have never shown their
+quick genius for organisation with more triumphant vigour. While the
+Girondins were still powerful, nine members of the Convention had been
+constituted an executive committee, April 6, 1793. They were in fact a
+kind of permanent cabinet, with practical irresponsibility. In the
+summer of 1793 the number was increased from nine to twelve, and these
+twelve were the centre of the revolutionary government. They fell into
+three groups. First, there were the scientific or practical
+administrators, of whom the most eminent was Carnot. Next came the
+directors of internal policy, the pure revolutionists, headed by Billaud
+de Varennes. Finally, there was a trio whose business it was to
+translate action into the phrases of revolutionary policy. This famous
+group was Robespierre, Couthon, and Saint Just.
+
+Besides the Committee of Public Safety there was another chief
+governmental committee, that of General Security. Its functions were
+mainly connected with the police, the arrests, and the prisons, but in
+all serious affairs the two Committees deliberated in common. There were
+also fourteen other groups of various size, taken from the Convention;
+they applied themselves with admirable zeal, and usually not with more
+zeal than skill, to schemes of public instruction, of finance, of
+legislation, of the administration of justice, and a host of other civil
+reforms, of all of which Napoleon Bonaparte was by and by to reap the
+credit. These bodies completed the civil revolution, which the
+Constituent and the Legislative Assemblies had left so mischievously
+incomplete that, as soon as ever the Convention had assembled, it was
+besieged by a host of petitioners praying them to explain and to pursue
+the abolition of the old feudal rights. Everything had still been left
+uncertain in men's minds, even upon that greatest of all the
+revolutionary questions. The feudal division of the committee of general
+legislation had in this eleventh hour to decide innumerable issues, from
+those of the widest practical importance, down to the prayer of a remote
+commune to be relieved from the charge of maintaining a certain mortuary
+lamp which had been a matter of seignorial obligation. The work done by
+the radical jurisconsults was never undone. It was the great and
+durable reward of the struggle. And we have to remember that these
+industrious and efficient bodies, as well as all other public bodies and
+functionaries whatever, were placed by the definite revolutionary
+constitution of 1793 under the direct orders of the Committee of Public
+Safety.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is hardly possible even now for any one who exults in the memory of
+the great deliverance of a brilliant and sociable people, to stand
+unmoved before the walls of that palace which Philibert Delorme reared
+for Catherine de' Medici, and which was thrown into ruin by the madness
+of a band of desperate men in our own days. Lewis had walked forth from
+the Tuileries on the fatal morning of the Tenth of August, holding his
+children by the hand, and lightly noticing, as he traversed the gardens,
+how early that year the leaves were falling. Lewis had by this time
+followed the fallen leaves into nothingness. The palace of the kings was
+now styled the Palace of the Nation, and the new republic carried on its
+work surrounded by the outward associations of the old monarchy. The
+Convention after the spring of 1793 held its sittings in what had
+formerly been the palace theatre. Fierce men from the Faubourgs of St.
+Antoine and St. Marceau, and fiercer women from the markets, shouted
+savage applause or menace from galleries, where not so long ago the
+Italian buffoons had amused the perpetual leisure of the finest ladies
+and proudest grandees of France. The Committee of General Security
+occupied the Pavillon de Marsan, looking over a dingy space that the
+conqueror at Rivoli afterwards made the most dazzling street in Europe.
+The Committee of Public Safety sat in the Pavillon de Flore, at the
+opposite end of the Tuileries on the river bank. The approaches were
+protected by guns and by a bodyguard, while inside there flitted to and
+fro a cloud of familiars, who have been compared by the enemies of the
+great Committee to the mutes of the court of the Grand Turk. Any one who
+had business with this awful body had to grope his way along gloomy
+corridors, that were dimly lighted by a single lamp at either end. The
+room in which the Committee sat round a table of green cloth was
+incongruously gay with the clocks, the bronzes, the mirrors, the
+tapestries, of the ruined court. The members met at eight in the morning
+and worked until one; from one to four they attended the sitting of the
+Convention. In the evening they met again, and usually sat until night
+was far advanced. It was no wonder if their hue became cadaverous, their
+eyes hollow and bloodshot, their brows stern, their glance preoccupied
+and sinister. Between ten and eleven every evening a sombre piece of
+business was transacted, which has half effaced in the memory of
+posterity all the heroic industry of the rest of the twenty-four hours.
+It was then that Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor, brought an
+account of his day's labour; how the revolutionary tribunal was working,
+how many had been convicted and how many acquitted, how large or how
+small had been the batch of the guillotine since the previous night.
+Across the breadth of the gardens, beyond their trees and fountains,
+stood the Monster itself, with its cruel symmetry, its colour as of the
+blood of the dead, its unheeding knife, neutral as the Fates.
+
+Robespierre has been held responsible for all the violences of the
+revolutionary government, and his position on the Committee appeared to
+be exceedingly strong. It was, however, for a long time much less strong
+in reality than it seemed: all depended upon successfully playing off
+one force against another, and at the same time maintaining himself at
+the centre of the see-saw. Robespierre was the literary and rhetorical
+member of the band; he was the author of the strident manifestoes in
+which Europe listened with exasperation to the audacious hopes and
+unfaltering purpose of the new France. This had the effect of investing
+him in the eyes of foreign nations with supreme and undisputed authority
+over the government. The truth is, that Robespierre was both disliked
+and despised by his colleagues. They thought of him as a mere maker of
+useful phrases; he in turn secretly looked down upon them, as the man
+who has a doctrine and a system in his head always looks down upon the
+man who lives from hand to mouth. If the Committee had been in the place
+of a government which has no opposition to fear, Robespierre would have
+been one of its least powerful members. But although the government was
+strong, there were at least three potent elements of opposition even
+within the ranks of the dominant revolutionary party itself.
+
+Three bodies in Paris were, each of them, the centre of an influence
+that might at any moment become the triumphant rival of the Committee of
+Public Safety. These bodies were, first, the Convention; second, the
+Commune of Paris; and thirdly, the Jacobin Club. The jealousy thus
+existing outside the Committee would have made any failure instantly
+destructive. At one moment, at the end of 1793, it was only the
+surrender of Toulon that saved the Committee from a hostile motion in
+the Convention, and such a motion would have sent half of them to the
+guillotine. They were reviled by the extreme party who ruled at the Town
+Hall for not carrying the policy of extermination far enough. They were
+reproached by Danton and his powerful section for carrying that policy
+too far. They were discredited by the small band of intriguers, like
+Bazire, who identified government with peculation. Finally, they were
+haunted by the shadow of a fear, which events were by and by to prove
+only too substantial, lest one of their military agents on the frontier
+should make himself their master. The key to the struggle of the
+factions between the winter of 1793 and the revolution of the summer of
+1794 is the vigorous resolve of the governing Committees not to part
+with power. The drama is one of the most exciting in the history of
+faction; it abounds in rapid turns and unexpected shifts, upon which the
+student may spend many a day and many a night, and after all he is
+forced to leave off in despair of threading an accurate way through the
+labyrinth of passion and intrigue. The broad traits of the situation,
+however, are tolerably simple. The difficulty was to find a principle of
+government which the people could be induced to accept. 'The rights of
+men and the new principles of liberty and equality,' Burke said, 'were
+very unhandy instruments for those who wished to establish a system of
+tranquillity and order. The factions,' he added with fierce sarcasm,
+'were to accomplish the purposes of order, morality, and submission to
+the laws, from the principles of atheism, profligacy, and sedition. They
+endeavoured to establish distinctions, by the belief of which they hoped
+to keep the spirit of murder safely bottled up and sealed for their own
+purposes, without endangering themselves by the fumes of the poison
+which they prepared for their enemies.' This is a ferocious and
+passionate version, but it is substantially not an unreal account of the
+position.
+
+Upon one point all parties agreed, and that was the necessity of
+founding the government upon force, and force naturally meant Terror.
+Their plea was that of Dido to Ilioneus and the stormbeaten sons of
+Dardanus, when they complained that her people had drawn the sword upon
+them, and barbarously denied the hospitality of the sandy shore:--
+
+   Res dura et regni novitas me talia cogunt Moliri.
+
+And that pithy chapter in Machiavelli's _Prince_ which treats of cruelty
+and clemency, and whether it be better to be loved or feared,
+anticipates the defence of the Terrorists, in the maxim that for a new
+prince it is impossible to avoid the name of cruel, because all new
+states abound in many perils. The difference arose on the question when
+Terror should be considered to have done as much of its work as it could
+be expected to do. This difference again was connected with difference
+of conception as to the type of the society which was ultimately to
+emerge from the existing chaos. Billaud-Varennes, the guiding spirit of
+the Committees, was without any conception of this kind. He was a man of
+force pure and simple. Danton was equally untouched by dreams of social
+transformation; his philosophy, so far as he had a definite philosophy,
+was, in spite of one or two inconsistent utterances, materialistic: and
+materialism, when it takes root in a sane, perspicacious, and indulgent
+character, as in the case of Danton, and, to take a better-known
+example, in the case of Jefferson, usually leads to a sound and positive
+theory of politics; chimeras have no place in it, though a rational
+social hope has the first place of all. Neither Danton nor Billaud
+expected a millennium; their only aim was to shape France into a
+coherent political personality, and the war between them turned upon the
+policy of prolonging the Terror after the frontiers had been saved and
+the risings in the provinces put down. There were, however, two parties
+who took the literature of the century in earnest; they thought that the
+hour had struck for translating, one of them, the sentimentalism of
+Rousseau, the other of them, the rationality of Voltaire and Diderot,
+into terms of politics that should form the basis of a new social life.
+The strife between the faction of Robespierre and the faction of
+Chaumette was the reproduction, under the shadow of the guillotine, of
+the great literary strife of a quarter of a century before between Jean
+Jacques and the writers whom he contemptuously styled Holbachians. The
+battle of the books had become a battle between bands of infuriated men.
+The struggle between Hebert and Chaumette and the Common Council of
+Paris on the one part, and the Committee and Robespierre on the other,
+was the concrete form of the deepest controversy that lies before modern
+society. Can the social union subsist without a belief in God? Chaumette
+answered Yes, and Robespierre cried No. Robespierre followed Rousseau in
+thinking that any one who should refuse to recognise the existence of a
+God, should be exiled as a monster devoid of the faculties of virtue and
+sociability. Chaumette followed Diderot, and Diderot told Samuel Romilly
+in 1783 that belief in God, as well as submission to kings, would be at
+an end all over the world in a very few years. The Hebertists might have
+taken for their motto Diderot's shocking couplet, if they could have
+known it, about using
+
+   Les entrailles du pretre
+   Au defaut d'un cordon pour etrangler les rois.
+
+The theists and the atheists, Chaumette and Robespierre, each of them
+accepted the doctrine that it was in the power of the armed legislator
+to impose any belief and any rites he pleased upon the country at his
+feet. The theism or the atheism of the new France depended, as they
+thought, on the issue of the war for authority between the Hebertists in
+the Common Council of Paris, and the Committee of Public Safety. That
+was the religious side of the attitude of the government to the
+opposition, and it is the side that possesses most historic interest.
+Billaud cared very little for religion in any way; his quarrel with the
+Commune and with Hebert was political. What Robespierre's drift appears
+to have been, was to use the political animosity of the Committee as a
+means of striking foes, against whom his own animosity was not only
+political but religious also.
+
+It would doubtless show a very dull apprehension of the violence and
+confusion of the time, to suppose that even Robespierre, with all his
+love for concise theories, was accustomed to state his aim to himself
+with the definite neatness in which it appears when reduced to literary
+statement. Pedant as he was, he was yet enough of a politician to see
+the practical urgency of restoring material order, whatever spiritual
+belief or disbelief might accompany it. The prospect of a rallying point
+for material order was incessantly changing; and Robespierre turned to
+different quarters in search of it almost from week to week. He was only
+able to exert a certain limited authority over his colleagues in the
+government, by virtue of his influence over the various sections of
+possible opposition, and this was a moral, and not an official,
+influence. It was acquired not by marked practical gifts, for in truth
+Robespierre did not possess them, but by his good character, by his
+rhetoric, and by the skill with which he kept himself prominently before
+the public eye. The effective seat of his power, notwithstanding many
+limits and incessant variations, was the Jacobin Club. There a speech
+from him threw his listeners into ecstasies, that have been
+disrespectfully compared to the paroxysms of Jansenist convulsionaries,
+or the hysterics of Methodist negroes on a cotton plantation. We
+naturally think of those grave men who a few years before had founded
+the republic in America. Jefferson served with Washington in the
+Virginian legislature and with Franklin in Congress, and he afterwards
+said that he never heard either of them speak ten minutes at a time;
+while John Adams declared that he never heard Jefferson utter three
+sentences together. Of Robespierre it is stated on good authority that
+for eighteen months there was not a single evening on which he did not
+make to the assembled Jacobins at least one speech, and that never a
+short one.
+
+Strange as it may seem, Robespierre's credit with this grim assembly was
+due to his truly Philistine respectability and to his literary faculty.
+He figured as the philosopher and bookman of the party: the most
+iconoclastic politicians are usually willing to respect the scholar,
+provided they are sure of his being on their side. Robespierre had from
+the first discountenanced the fantastic caprices of some too excitable
+allies. He distrusted the noisy patriots of the middle class, who
+curried favour with the crowd by clothing themselves in coarse garments,
+clutching a pike, and donning the famous cap of red woollen, which had
+been the emblem of the emancipation of a slave in ancient Rome. One
+night at the Jacobin Club, Robespierre mounted the tribune, dressed with
+his usual elaborate neatness, and still wearing powder in his hair. An
+onlooker unceremoniously planted on the orator's head the red cap
+demanded by revolutionary etiquette. Robespierre threw the sacred symbol
+on the ground with a severe air, and then proceeded with a discourse of
+much austerity. Not that he was averse to a certain seemly decoration,
+or to the embodiment of revolutionary sentiment by means of a symbolism
+that strikes our cooler imagination as rather puerile. He was as ready
+as others to use the arts of the theatre for the liturgy of patriots.
+One of the most touching of all the minor dramatic incidents of the
+Revolution was the death of Barra. This was a child of thirteen who
+enrolled himself as a drummer, and marched with the Blues to suppress
+the rebel Whites in La Vendee. One day he advanced too close to the
+enemy's post, intrepidly beating the charge. He was surrounded, but the
+peasant soldiers were loth to strike, 'Cry _Long live the King!_' they
+shouted, 'or else death!' 'Long live the Republic!' was the poor little
+hero's answer, as a ball pierced his heart. Robespierre described the
+incident to the Convention, and amid prodigious enthusiasm demanded that
+the body of the young martyr of liberty should be transported to the
+Pantheon with special pomp, and that David, the artist of the
+Revolution, should be charged with the duty of devising and embellishing
+the festival. As it happened, the arrangements were made for the
+ceremony to take place on the Tenth of Thermidor--a day on which
+Robespierre and all Paris were concerned about a celebration of bloodier
+import. Thermidor, however, was still far off; and the red sun of
+Jacobin enthusiasm seemed as if it would shine unclouded for ever.
+
+Even at the Jacobins, however, popular as he was, Robespierre felt every
+instant the necessity of walking cautiously. He was as far removed as
+possible from that position of Dictator which some historians with a
+wearisome iteration persist in ascribing to him, even at the moment when
+they are enumerating the defeats which the party of Hebert was able to
+inflict upon him in the very bosom of the Mother Club itself. They make
+him the sanguinary dictator in one sentence, and the humiliated
+intriguer in the next. The latter is much the more correct account of
+the two, if we choose to call a man an intriguer who was honestly
+anxious to suppress what he considered a wicked faction, and yet had
+need of some dexterity to keep his own head upon his shoulders.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the winter of 1793 the Municipal party, guided by Hebert and
+Chaumette, made their memorable attempt to extirpate Christianity in
+France. The doctrine of D'Holbach's supper-table had for a short space
+the arm of flesh and the sword of the temporal power on its side. It was
+the first appearance of dogmatic atheism in Europe as a political force.
+This makes it one of the most remarkable moments in the Revolution, just
+as it makes the Revolution itself the most remarkable moment in modern
+history. The first political demonstration of atheism was attended by
+some of the excesses, the folly, the extravagances that stained the
+growth of Christianity. On the whole it is a very mild story compared
+with the atrocities of the Jewish records or the crimes of Catholicism.
+The worst charge against the party of Chaumette is that they were
+intolerant, and the charge is deplorably true; but this charge cannot
+lie in the mouth of persecuting churches.
+
+Historical recriminations, however, are not very edifying. It is
+perfectly fair when Catholics talk of the atheist Terror, to rejoin that
+the retainers of Anjou and Montpensier slew more men and women on the
+first day of the Saint Bartholomew than perished in Paris through the
+Years I. and II. But the retort does us no good beyond the region of
+dialectic; it rather brings us down to the level of the poor sectaries
+whom it crushes. Let us raise ourselves into clearer air. The fault of
+the atheist is that they knew no better than to borrow the maxims of the
+churchmen; and even those who agree with the dogmatic denials of the
+atheists--if such there be--ought yet to admit that the mere change from
+superstition to reason is a small gain, if the conclusions of reason are
+still to be enforced by the instruments of superstition. Our opinions
+are less important than the spirit and temper with which they possess
+us, and even good opinions are worth very little unless we hold them in
+a broad, intelligent, and spacious way. Now some of the opinions of
+Chaumette were full of enlightenment and hope. He had a generous and
+vivid faith in humanity, and he showed the natural effect of abandoning
+belief in another life by his energetic interest in arrangements for
+improving the lot of man in this life. But it would be far better to
+share the superstitious opinions of a virtuous and benignant priest like
+the Bishop in Victor Hugo's _Miserables_, than to hold those good
+opinions of Chaumette as he held them, with a rancorous intolerance, a
+reckless disregard of the rights and feelings of others, and a shallow
+forgetfulness of all that great and precious part of our natures that
+lies out of the immediate domain of the logical understanding. One can
+understand how an honest man would abhor the darkness and tyranny of the
+Church. But then to borrow the same absolutism in the interests of new
+light, was inevitably to bring the new light into the same abhorrence
+as had befallen the old system of darkness. And this is exactly what
+happened. In every family where a mother sought to have her child
+baptized, or where sons and daughters sought to have the dying spirit of
+the old consoled by the last sacrament, there sprang up a bitter enemy
+to the government which had closed the churches and proscribed the
+priests.
+
+How could a society whose spiritual life had been nourished in the
+solemn mysticism of the Middle Ages, suddenly turn to embrace a gaudy
+paganism? The common self-respect of humanity was outraged by apostate
+priests who, whether under the pressure of fear of Chaumette, or in a
+very superfluity of folly and ecstasy of degradation, hastened to
+proclaim the charlatanry of their past lives, as they filed before the
+Convention, led by the Archbishop of Paris, and accompanied by rude
+acolytes bearing piles of the robes and the vessels of silver and gold
+with which they had once served their holy offices. 'Our enemies,'
+Voltaire had said, 'have always on their side the fat of the land, the
+sword, the strong box, and the _canaille_.' For a moment all these
+forces were on the other side, and it is deplorable to think that they
+were as much abused by their new masters as by the old. The explanation
+is that the destructive party had been brought up in the schools of the
+ecclesiastical party, and their work was a mere outbreak of mutiny, not
+a grave and responsible attempt to lead France to a worthier faith. If,
+as Chaumette believed, mankind are the only Providence of men, surely
+in that faith more than in any other are we bound to be very solicitous
+not to bring the violent hand of power on any of the spiritual
+acquisitions of the race, and very patient in dealing with the slowness
+of the common people to leave their outworn creeds.
+
+Instead of defying the Church by the theatrical march of the Goddess of
+Reason under the great sombre arches of the Cathedral of Our Lady,
+Chaumette should have found comfort in a firm calculation of the
+conditions. 'You,' he might have said to the priests,--'you have so
+debilitated the minds of men and women by your promises and your dreams,
+that many a generation must come and go before Europe can throw off the
+yoke of your superstition. But we promise you that they shall be
+generations of strenuous battle. We give you all the advantages that you
+can get from the sincerity and pious worth of the good and simple among
+you. We give you all that the bad among you may get by resort to the
+poisoned weapons of your profession and its traditions,--its bribes to
+mental indolence, its hypocritical affectations in the pulpit, its
+tyranny in the closet, its false speciousness in the world, its menace
+at the deathbed. With all these you may do your worst, and still
+humanity will escape you; still the conscience of the race will rise
+away from you; still the growth of brighter ideals and a nobler purpose
+will go on, leaving ever further and further behind them your dwarfed
+finality and leaden moveless stereotype. We shall pass you by on your
+flank; your fieriest darts will only spend themselves on air. We will
+not attack you as Voltaire did; we will not exterminate you; we shall
+explain you. History will place your dogma in its class, above or below
+a hundred competing dogmas, exactly as the naturalist classifies his
+species. From being a conviction, it will sink to a curiosity; from
+being the guide to millions of human lives, it will dwindle down to a
+chapter in a book. As History explains your dogma, so Science will dry
+it up; the conception of law will silently make the conception of the
+daily miracle of your altars seem impossible; the mental climate will
+gradually deprive your symbols of their nourishment, and men will turn
+their backs on your system, not because they have confuted it, but
+because, like witchcraft or astrology, it has ceased to interest them.
+The great ship of your Church, once so stout and fair and well laden
+with good destinies, is become a skeleton ship; it is a phantom hulk,
+with warped planks and sere canvas, and you who work it are no more than
+ghosts of dead men, and at the hour when you seem to have reached the
+bay, down your ship will sink like lead or like stone to the deepest
+bottom.'
+
+Alas, the speculation of the century had not rightly attuned men's minds
+to this firm confidence in the virtue of liberty, sounding like a bell
+through all distractions. None of these high things were said. The
+temples were closed, the sacred symbols defiled, the priests
+maltreated, the worshippers dispersed. The Commune of Paris imitated the
+policy of the King of France who revoked the Edict of Nantes, and
+democratic atheism parodied the dragonnades of absolutist Catholicism.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Robespierre was unutterably outraged by the proceedings of the atheists.
+They perplexed him as a politician intent upon order, and they afflicted
+him sorely as an ardent disciple of the Savoyard Vicar. Hebert, however,
+was so strong that it needed some courage to attack him, nor did
+Robespierre dare to withstand him to the face. But he did not flinch
+from making an energetic assault upon atheism and the excesses of its
+partisans. His admirers usually count his speech of the Twenty-first of
+November one of the most admirable of his oratorical successes. The
+Sphinx still sits inexorable at our gates, and his words have lost none
+of their interest. 'Every philosopher and every individual,' he said,
+'may adopt whatever opinion he pleases about atheism. Any one who wishes
+to make such an opinion into a crime is an insensate; but the public man
+or the legislator who should adopt such a system, would be a hundred
+times more insensate still. The National Convention abhors it. The
+Convention is not the author of a scheme of metaphysics. It was not to
+no purpose that it published the Declaration of the Rights of Man in
+presence of the Supreme Being. I shall be told perhaps that I have a
+narrow intelligence, that I am a man of prejudice, and a fanatic. I
+have already said that I spoke neither as an individual nor as a
+philosopher with a system, but as a representative of the people.
+_Atheism is aristocratic. The idea of a great being who watches over
+oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is essentially the
+idea of the people._ This is the sentiment of Europe and the Universe;
+it is the sentiment of the French nation. That people is attached
+neither to priests, nor to superstition, nor to ceremonies; it is
+attached only to worship in itself, or in other words to the idea of an
+incomprehensible Power, the terror of wrongdoers, the stay and comfort
+of virtue, to which it delights to render words of homage that are all
+so many anathemas against injustice and triumphant crime.'
+
+This is Robespierre's favourite attitude, the priest posing as
+statesman. Like others, he declares the Supreme Power incomprehensible,
+and then describes him in terms of familiar comprehension. He first
+declares atheism an open choice, and then he brands it with the most
+odious epithet in the accepted vocabulary of the hour. Danton followed
+practically the same line, though saying much less about it. 'If
+Greece,' he said in the Convention, 'had its Olympian games, France too
+shall solemnise her sans-culottid days. The people will have high
+festivals; they will offer incense to the Supreme Being, to the master
+of nature; for we never intended to annihilate the reign of superstition
+in order to set up the reign of atheism.... If we have not honoured the
+priest of error and fanaticism, neither do we wish to honour the priest
+of incredulity: we wish to serve the people. I demand that there shall
+be an end of these anti-religious masquerades in the Convention.'
+
+There was an end of the masquerading, but the Hebertists still kept
+their ground. Danton, Robespierre, and the Committee were all equally
+impotent against them for some months longer. The revolutionary force
+had been too strong to be resisted by any government since the Paris
+insurgents had carried both King and Assembly in triumph from Versailles
+in the October of 1789. It was now too strong for those who had begun to
+strive with all their might to build a new government out of the
+agencies that had shattered the old to pieces. For some months the
+battle which had been opened by Robespierre's remonstrance against
+atheistic intolerance, degenerated into a series of masked skirmishes.
+The battle-ground of rival principles was overshadowed by the baleful
+wings of the genius of demonic Hate. _Vexilla regis prodeunt inferni_;
+the banners of the King of the Pit came forth. The scene at the
+Cordeliers for a time became as frantic as a Council of the Early Church
+settling the true composition of the Holy Trinity. Or it recalls the
+fierce and bloody contentions between Demos and Oligarchy in an old
+Greek town. We think of the day in the harbour of Corcyra when the
+Athenian admiral who had come to deliver the people, sailed out to meet
+the Spartan enemy, and on turning round to see if his Corcyrean allies
+were following, saw them following indeed, but the crew of every ship
+striving in enraged conflict with one another. Collot D'Herbois had come
+back in hot haste from Lyons, where, along with Fouche, he had done his
+best to carry out the decree of the Convention, that not one stone of
+the city should be left on the top of another, and that even its very
+name should cease from the lips of men. Carrier was recalled from
+Nantes, where his feats of ingenious massacre had rivalled the exploits
+of the cruellest and maddest of the Roman Emperors. The presence of
+these men of blood gave new courage and resolution to the Hebertists.
+Though the alliance was informal, yet as against Danton, Camille
+Desmoulins, and the rest of the Indulgents, as well as against
+Robespierre, they made common cause.
+
+Camille Desmoulins attacked Hebert in successive numbers of a journal
+that is perhaps the one truly literary monument of this stage of the
+revolution. Hebert retaliated by impugning the patriotism of Desmoulins
+in the Club, and the unfortunate wit, notwithstanding the efforts of
+Robespierre on his behalf, was for a while turned out of the sacred
+precincts. The power of the extreme faction was shown in relation to
+other prominent members of the party whom they loved to stigmatise by
+the deadly names of Indulgent and Moderantist. Even Danton himself was
+attacked (December 1793), and the integrity of his patriotism brought
+into question. Robespierre made an energetic defence of his great rival
+in the hierarchy of revolution, and the defence saved Danton from the
+mortal ignominy of expulsion from the communion of the orthodox. On the
+other hand, Anacharsis Clootz, that guileless ally of the party of
+delirium, was less fortunate. Robespierre assailed the cosmopolitan for
+being a German baron, for having four thousand pounds a year, and for
+striking his sans-culottism some notes higher than the regular pitch.
+Even M. Louis Blanc calls this an iniquity, and sets it down as the
+worst page in Robespierre's life. Others have described Robespierre as
+struck at this time by the dire malady of kings--hatred of the Idea. It
+seems, however, a hard saying that devotion to the Idea is to extinguish
+common sense. Clootz, notwithstanding his simple and disinterested
+character, and his possession of some rays of the modern illumination,
+was one of the least sane of all the men who in the exultation of their
+silly gladness were suddenly caught up by that great wheel of fire. All
+we can say is that Robespierre's bitter demeanour towards Clootz was
+ungenerous; but then this is only natural in him. Robespierre often
+clothed cool policy in the semblance of clemency, but I cannot hear in
+any phrase he ever used, or see in any measure he ever proposed, the
+mark of true generosity; of kingliness of spirit, not a trace. He had no
+element of ready and cordial propitiation, an element that can never be
+wanting in the greatest leaders in time of storm. If he resisted the
+atrocious proposals to put Madame Elizabeth to death, he was thinking
+not of mercy or justice, but of the mischievous effect that her
+execution would have upon the public opinion of Europe, and he was so
+unmanly as to speak of her as _la meprisable soeur de Louis XVI_. Such
+a phrase is the disclosure of an abject stratum in his soul.
+
+Yet this did not prevent him from seeing and denouncing the bloody
+extravagances of the Proconsuls, the representatives of Parisian
+authority in the provinces; nor from standing firm against the execution
+of the Seventy-Three, who had been bold enough to question the purgation
+of the National Convention on the Thirty-first of May. But the return of
+Collot d'Herbois made the situation more intricate. Collot was by his
+position the ally of Billaud, and to attack him, therefore, was to
+attack the most powerful member of the Committee of Public Safety.
+Billaud was too formidable. He was always the impersonation of the ruder
+genius of the Revolution, and the incarnation of the philosophy of the
+Terror, not as a delirium, but as a piece of deliberate policy. His
+pale, sober, and concentrated physiognomy seemed a perpetual menace. He
+had no gifts of speech, but his silence made people shudder, like the
+silence of the thunder when the tempest rages at its height. It was said
+by contemporaries that if Vadier was a hyaena, Barere a jackal, and
+Robespierre a cat, Billaud was a tiger.
+
+The cat perceived that he was in danger of not having the tiger, jackal,
+and hyaena, on his side. Robespierre, in whom spasmodical courage and
+timidity ruled by rapid turns, began to suspect that he had been
+premature; and a convenient illness, which some suppose to have been
+feigned, excused his withdrawal for some weeks from a scene where he
+felt that he could no longer see clear. We cannot doubt that both he and
+Danton were perfectly assured that the anarchic party must unavoidably
+roll headlong into the abyss. But the hour of doom was uncertain. To
+make a mistake in the right moment, to hurry the crisis, was instant
+death. Robespierre was a more adroit calculator than Danton. We must not
+confound his thin and querulous reserve with that stout and deep-browed
+patience, which may imply as superb a fortitude, and may demand as much
+iron control in a statesman, as the most heroic exploits of political
+energy. But his habit of waiting on force, instead of, like the other,
+taking the initiative with force, had trained his sight. The mixture of
+astuteness with his scruple, of egoistic policy with his stiffness for
+doctrine, gave him an advantage over Danton, that made his life worth
+exactly three months' more purchase than Danton's. It has been said that
+Spinozism or Transcendentalism in poetic production becomes
+Machiavellism in reflection: for the same reasons we may always expect
+sentimentalism in theory to become under the pressure of action a very
+self-protecting guile. Robespierre's mind was not rich nor flexible
+enough for true statesmanship, and it is a grave mistake to suppose that
+the various cunning tacks in which his career abounds, were any sign of
+genuine versatility or resource or political growth and expansion. They
+were, in fact, the resort of a man whose nerves were weaker than his
+volition. Robespierre was a kind of spinster. Force of head did not
+match his spiritual ambition. He was not, we repeat, a coward in any
+common sense; in that case he would have remained quiet among the
+croaking frogs of the Marsh, and by and by have come to hold a portfolio
+under the first Consul. He did not fear death, and he envied with
+consuming envy those to whom nature had given the qualities of
+initiative. But his nerves always played him false. The consciousness of
+having to resolve to take a decided step alone, was the precursor of a
+fit of trembling. His heart did not fail, but he could not control the
+parched voice, nor the twitching features, not the ghastly palsy of
+inner misgiving. In this respect Robespierre recalls a more illustrious
+man; we think of Cicero tremblingly calling upon the Senate to decide
+for him whether he should order the execution of the Catilinarian
+conspirators. It is to be said, however, in his favour that he had the
+art, which Cicero lacked, to hide his pusillanimity. Robespierre knew
+himself, and did his best to keep his own secret.
+
+His absence during the final crisis of the anarchic party allowed events
+to ripen, without committing him to that initiative in dangerous action
+which he had dreaded on the Tenth of August, as he dreaded it on every
+other decisive day of this burning time. The party of the Commune
+became more and more daring in their invectives against the Convention
+and the Committees. At length they proclaimed open insurrection. But
+Paris was cold, and opinion was divided. In the night of the Thirteenth
+of March, Hebert, Chaumette, Clootz, were arrested. The next day
+Robespierre recovered sufficiently to appear at the Jacobin Club. He
+joined his colleagues of the Committee of Public Safety in striking the
+blow. On the Twenty-fourth of March the Ultra-Revolutionist leaders were
+beheaded.
+
+The first bloody breach in the Jacobin ranks was speedily followed by
+the second. The Right wing of the opposition to the Committee soon
+followed the Left down the ways to dusty death, and the execution of the
+Anarchists only preceded by a week the arrest of the Moderates. When the
+seizure of Danton had once before been discussed in the Committee,
+Robespierre resisted the proposal violently. We have already seen how he
+defended Danton at the Jacobin Club, when the Club underwent the process
+of purification in the winter. What produced this sudden tack? How came
+Robespierre to assent in March to a violence which he had angrily
+discountenanced in February? There had been no change in the policy or
+attitude of Danton himself. The military operations against the domestic
+and foreign enemies were no sooner fairly in the way of success, than
+Danton began to meditate in serious earnest the consolidation of a
+republican system of law and justice. He would fain have stayed the
+Terror. 'Let us leave something,' he said, 'to the guillotine of
+opinion.' He aided, no doubt, in the formation of the Revolutionary
+Tribunal, but this was exactly in harmony with his usual policy of
+controlling popular violence without alienating the strength of popular
+sympathy. The process of the tribunal was rough and summary, but it was
+fairer--until Robespierre's Law of Prairial--than people usually
+suppose, and it was the very temple of the goddess of Justice herself
+compared with the September massacres. 'Let us prove ourselves
+terrible,' Danton said, 'to relieve the people from the necessity of
+being so.' His activity had been incessant in urging and superintending
+the great levies against the foreigner; he had gone repeatedly on
+distant and harassing expeditions, as the representative of the
+Convention at the camps on the frontier. In the midst of all this he
+found time to press forward measures for the instruction of the young,
+and for the due appointment of judges, and his head was full of ideas
+for the construction of a permanent executive council. It was this which
+made him eager for a cessation of the method of Terror, and it was this
+which made the Committee of Public Safety his implacable enemy.
+
+Why, then, did Robespierre, who also passed as a man of order and
+humanity, not continue to support Danton after the suppression of the
+Hebertists, as he had supported him before? The common and facile answer
+is that he was moved by a malignant desire to put a rival out of the
+way. On the whole, the evidence seems to support Napoleon's opinion that
+Robespierre was incapable of voting for the death of anybody in the
+world on grounds of personal enmity. And his acquiescence in the ruin of
+Danton is intelligible enough on the grounds of selfish policy. The
+Committee hated Danton for the good reason that he had openly attacked
+them, and his cry for clemency was an inflammatory and dangerous protest
+against their system. Now Robespierre, rightly or wrongly, had made up
+his mind that the Committee was the instrument by which, and which only,
+he could work out his own vague schemes of power and reconstruction.
+And, in any case, how could he resist the Committee? The famous
+insurrectionary force of Paris, which Danton had been the first to
+organise against a government, had just been chilled by the fall of the
+Hebertists. Least of all could this force be relied upon to rise in
+defence of the very chief whose every word for many weeks past had been
+a protest against the Communal leaders. In separating himself from the
+Ultras, Danton had cut off the great reservoir of his peculiar strength.
+
+It may be said that the Convention was the proper centre of resistance
+to the designs of the Committee, and that if Danton and Robespierre had
+united their forces in the Convention they would have defeated Billaud
+and his allies. This seems to us more than doubtful. The Committee had
+acquired an immense preponderance over the Convention. They had been
+eminently successful in the immense tasks imposed upon them. They had
+the prestige not only of being the government--so great a thing in a
+country that had just emerged from the condition of a centralised
+monarchy; they had also the prestige of being a government that had done
+its work triumphantly. We are now in March. In July we shall find that
+Robespierre adopted the very policy that we are now discussing, of
+playing off the Convention against the Committee. In July that policy
+ended in his headlong fall. Why should it have been any more successful
+four months earlier?
+
+What we may say is, that Robespierre was bound in all morality to defend
+Danton in the Convention at every hazard. Possibly so; but then to run
+risks for chivalry's sake was not in Robespierre's nature, and no man
+can climb out beyond the limitations of his own character. His narrow
+head and thin blood and instable nerve, his calculating humour and his
+frigid egoism, disinclined him to all games of chance. His apologists
+have sought to put a more respectable colour on his abandonment of
+Danton. The precisian, they say, disapproved of Danton's lax and
+heedless courses. Danton said to him one day:--'What do I care? Public
+opinion is a strumpet, and posterity a piece of nonsense.' How should
+the puritanical lawyer endure such cynicism as this? And Danton
+delighted in inflicting these coarse shocks. Again, Danton had given
+various gross names of contempt to Saint Just. Was Robespierre not to
+feel insults offered to the ablest and most devoted of his lieutenants?
+What was more important than all, the acclamations with which the
+partisans of reaction greeted the fall of the Ultras, made it necessary
+to give instant and unmistakable notice to the foes of the Revolution
+that the goddess of the scorching eye and fiery hand still grasped the
+axe of her vengeance.
+
+These are pleas invented after the fact. All goes to show that
+Robespierre was really moved by nothing more than his invariable dread
+of being left behind, of finding himself on the weaker side, of not
+seeming practical and political enough. And having made up his mind that
+the stronger party was bent on the destruction of the Dantonists, he
+became fiercer than Billaud himself. It is constantly seen that the
+waverer, of nervous atrabiliar constitution, no sooner overcomes the
+agony of irresolution, than he flings himself on his object with a
+vindictive tenacity that seems to repay him for all the moral
+humiliation inflicted on him by his stifled doubts. He redeems the
+slowness of his approach by the fury of his spring. 'Robespierre,' says
+M. d'Hericault, 'precipitated himself to the front of the opinion that
+was yelling against his friends of yesterday. In order to keep his usual
+post in the van of the Revolution, in order to secure the advantage to
+his own popularity of an execution which the public voice seemed to
+demand, he came forward as the author of that execution, though only the
+day before he had hesitated about its utility, and though it was, in
+truth far less useful to him than it proved to be to his future
+antagonists.'
+
+Robespierre first alarmed Danton's friends by assuming a certain icy
+coldness of manner, and by some menacing phrases about the faction of
+the so-called Moderates. Danton had gone, as he often did, to his native
+village of Arcis-sur-Aube, to seek repose and a little clearness of
+sight in the night that wrapped him about. He was devoid of personal
+ambition; he never had any humour for mere factious struggles. His,
+again, was the temperament of violent force, and in such types the
+reaction is always tremendous. The indomitable activity of the last
+twenty months had bred weariness of spirit. The nemesis of a career of
+strenuous Will in large natures is apt to be a sudden sense of the irony
+of things. In Danton, as with Byron it happened afterwards, the
+vehemence of the revolutionary spirit was touched by this desolating
+irony. His friends tried to rouse him. It is not clear that he could
+have done anything. The balance of force, after the suppression of the
+Hebertists, was irretrievably against him, as calculation had already
+revealed to Robespierre.
+
+There are various stories of the pair having met at dinner almost on the
+eve of Danton's arrest, and parting with sombre disquietude on both
+sides. The interview, with its champagne, its interlocutors, its play of
+sinister repartee, may possibly have taken place, but the alleged
+details are plainly apocryphal. After all, 'Religion ist in der Thiere
+Trieb,' says Wallenstein; 'the very savage drinks not with the victim,
+into whose breast he means to plunge a sword.' Danton was warned that
+Robespierre was plotting his arrest. 'If I thought he had the bare
+idea,' said Danton with something of Gargantuan hyperbole, 'I would eat
+his bowels out.' Such was the disdain with which the 'giant of the
+mighty bone and bold emprise' thought of our meagre-hearted pedant. The
+truth is that in the stormy and distracted times of politics, and
+perhaps in all times, contempt is a dangerous luxury. A man may be a
+very poor creature, and still have a faculty for mischief. And
+Robespierre had this faculty in the case of Danton. With singular
+baseness, he handed over to Saint Just a collection of notes, to serve
+as material for the indictment which Saint Just was to present to the
+Convention. They comprised everything that suspicion could interpret
+malignantly, from the most conspicuous acts of Danton's public life,
+down to the casual freedom of private discourse.
+
+Another infamy was to follow. After the arrest, and on the proceedings
+to obtain the assent of the Convention to the trial of Danton and others
+of its members, one only of their friends had the courage to rise and
+demand that they should be heard at the bar. Robespierre burst out in
+cold rage; he asked whether they had undergone so many heroic
+sacrifices, counting among them these acts of 'painful severity,' only
+to fall under the yoke of a band of domineering intriguers; and he cried
+out impatiently that they would brook no claim of privilege, and suffer
+no rotten idol. The word was felicitously chosen, for the Convention
+dreaded to have its independence suspected, and it dreaded this all the
+more because at this time its independence did not really exist. The
+vote against Danton was unanimous, and the fact that it was so is the
+deepest stain on the fame of this assembly. On the afternoon of the
+Sixteenth Germinal (April 5, 1794) Paris in amazement and some
+stupefaction saw the once-dreaded Titan of the Mountain fast bound in
+the tumbril, and faring towards the sharp-clanging knife. 'I leave it
+all in a frightful welter,' Danton is reported to have said. 'Not a man
+of them has an idea of government. Robespierre will follow me; he is
+dragged down by me. Ah, better be a poor fisherman than meddle with the
+governing of men!'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Let us pause for a moment over a calmer reminiscence. This was the very
+day on which the virtuous and high-minded Condorcet quitted the friendly
+roof that for nine months had concealed him from the search of
+proscription. The same week he was found dead in his prison. While
+Danton was storming with impotent thunder before the tribunal, Condorcet
+was writing those closing words of his Sketch of Human Progress, which
+are always so full of strength and edification. 'How this picture of the
+human race freed from all its fetters,--withdrawn from the empire of
+chance, as from that of the enemies of progress, and walking with firm
+and assured step in the way of truth, of virtue, and happiness, presents
+to the philosopher a sight that consoles him for the errors, the crimes,
+the injustice, with which the earth is yet stained, and of which he is
+not seldom the victim! It is in the contemplation of this picture that
+he receives the reward of his efforts for the progress of reason, for
+the defence of liberty. He ventures to link them with the eternal chain
+of the destinies of man: it is there he finds the true recompense of
+virtue, the pleasure of having done a lasting good; fate can no longer
+undo it, by any disastrous compensation that shall restore prejudice and
+bondage. This contemplation is for him a refuge, into which the
+recollection of his persecutors can never follow him; in which, living
+in thought with man reinstated in the rights and the dignity of his
+nature, he forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed, by base fear,
+by envy: it is here that he truly abides with his fellows, in an elysium
+that his reason has known how to create for itself, and that his love
+for humanity adorns with all purest delights.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In following the turns of the drama which was to end in the tragedy of
+Thermidor, we perceive that after the fall of the anarchists and the
+death of Danton, the relations between Robespierre and the Committees
+underwent a change. He, who had hitherto been on the side of government,
+became in turn an agency of opposition. He did this in the interest of
+ultimate stability, but the difference between the new position and the
+old is that he now distinctly associated the idea of a stable republic
+with the ascendency of his own religious conceptions. How far the
+ascendency of his own personality was involved, we have no means of
+judging. The vulgar accusation against him is that he now deliberately
+aimed at a dictatorship, and began to plot with that end in view. It is
+always the most difficult thing in the world to draw a line between mere
+arrogant egoism on the one hand, and on the other the identification of
+a man's personal elevation with the success of his public cause. The two
+ends probably become mixed in his mind, and if the cause be a good one,
+it is the height of pharisaical folly to quarrel with him, because he
+desires that his authority and renown shall receive some of the lustre
+of a far-shining triumph. What we complain of in Napoleon Bonaparte, for
+instance, is not that he sought power, but that he sought it in the
+interests of a coarse, brutal, and essentially unmeaning personal
+ambition. And so of Robespierre. We need not discuss the charge that he
+sought to make himself master. The important thing is that his mastery
+could have served no great end for France; that it would have been like
+himself, poor, barren, and hopelessly mediocre. And this would have been
+seen on every side. France had important military tasks to perform
+before her independence was assured. Robespierre hated war, and was
+jealous of every victory. France was in urgent need of stable
+government, of new laws, of ordered institutions. Robespierre never said
+a word to indicate that he had a single positive idea in his head on any
+of these great departments. And, more than this, he was incapable of
+making use of men who were more happily endowed than himself. He had
+never mastered that excellent observation of De Retz, that of all the
+qualities of a good party chief, none is so indispensable as being able
+to suppress on many occasions, and to hide on all, even legitimate
+suspicions. He was corroded by suspicion, and this paralyses able
+servants. Finally, Robespierre had no imperial quality of soul, but only
+that very sorry imitation of it, a lively irritability.
+
+The base of Robespierre's schemes of social reconstruction now came
+clearly into view; and what a base! An official Supreme Being, and a
+regulated Terror. The one was to fill up the spiritual void, and the
+other to satisfy all the exigencies of temporal things. It is to the
+credit of Robespierre's perspicacity that he should have recognised the
+human craving for religion, but this credit is as naught when we
+contemplate the jejune thing that passed for religion in his dim and
+narrow understanding. Rousseau had brought a new soul into the
+eighteenth century by the Savoyard Vicar's Profession of Faith, the most
+fervid and exalted expression of emotional deism that religious
+literature contains; vague, irrational, incoherent, cloudy; but the
+clouds are suffused with glowing gold. When we turn from that to the
+political version of it in Robespierre's discourse on the relations of
+religious and moral ideas with republican principles, we feel as one who
+revisits a landscape that had been made glorious to him by a summer sky
+and fresh liquid winds from the gates of the evening sun, only to find
+it dead under a gray heaven and harsh blasts from the northeast.
+Robespierre's words on the Supreme Being are never a brimming stream of
+deep feeling; they are a literary concoction: never the self-forgetting
+expansion of the religious soul, but only the composite of the
+rhetorician. He thought he had a passion for religion; what he took for
+religion was little more than mental decorum. We do not mean that he was
+insincere, or that he was without a feeling for high things. But here,
+as in all else, his aspiration was far beyond his faculty; he yearned
+for great spiritual emotions, as he had yearned for great thoughts and
+great achievements, but his spiritual capacity was as scanty and obscure
+as his intelligence. And where unkind Nature thus unequally yokes lofty
+objects in a man with a short mental reach, she stamps him with the very
+definition of mediocrity.
+
+How can we speak with decent patience of a man who seriously thought
+that he should conciliate the conservative and theological elements of
+the society at his feet, by such an odious opera-piece as the Feast of
+the Supreme Being? This was designed as a triumphant ripost to the Feast
+of Reason, which Chaumette and his friends had celebrated in the winter.
+The energumens of the Goddess of Reason had now been some weeks in
+their bloody graves; by this time, if they had given the wrong answer to
+the supreme enigma, their eyes would perhaps be opened. Robespierre
+persuaded the Convention to decree an official recognition of the
+Supreme Being, and to attend a commemorative festival in honour of their
+mystic patron. He contrived to be chosen president for the decade in
+which the festival would fall. When the day came (20th Prairial, June 8,
+1794), he clothed himself with more than even his usual care. As he
+looked out from the windows of the Tuileries upon the jubilant crowd in
+the gardens, he was intoxicated with enthusiasm. 'O Nature,' he cried,
+'how sublime thy power, how full of delight! How tyrants must grow pale
+at the idea of such a festival as this!' In pontifical pride he walked
+at the head of the procession, with flowers and wheat-ears in his hand,
+to the sound of chants and symphonies and choruses of maidens. On the
+first of the great basins in the gardens, David, the artist, had devised
+an allegorical structure for which an inauspicious doom was prepared.
+Atheism, a statue of life size, was throned in the midst of an amiable
+group of human Vices, with Madness by her side, and Wisdom menacing them
+with lofty wrath. Great are the perils of symbolism. Robespierre applied
+a torch to Atheism, but alas, the wind was hostile, or else Atheism and
+Madness were damp. They obstinately resisted the torch, and it was
+hapless Wisdom who took fire. Her face, all blackened by smoke, grinned
+a hideous ghastly grin at her sturdy rivals. The miscarriage of the
+allegory was an evil omen, and men probably thought how much better the
+churchmen always managed their conjurings and the art of spectacle.
+There was a great car drawn by milk-white oxen; in the front were ranged
+sheaves of golden grain, while at the back shepherds and shepherdesses
+posed with scenic graces. The whole mummery was pagan. It was a bringing
+back of Cerealia and Thesmophoria to earth. It stands as the most
+disgusting and contemptible anachronism in history.
+
+The famous republican Calendar, with its Prairials and Germinals, its
+Ventoses and Pluvioses, was an anachronism of the same kind, though it
+was less despicable in its manifestation. Its philosophic base was just
+as retrograde and out of season as the fooleries of the Feast of the
+Supreme Being. The association of worship and sacredness with the fruits
+of the earth, with the forces of nature, with the power and variety of
+the elements, could only be sincere so long as men really thought of all
+these things as animated each by a special will of its own. Such an
+association became mere charlatanry, when knowledge once passed into the
+positive stage. How could men go back to adore an outer world, after
+they had found out the secret that it is a mere huge group of phenomena,
+following fixed courses, and not obeying spontaneous and unaccountable
+volitions of their own? And what could be more puerile than the fanciful
+connection of the Supreme Being with a pastoral simplicity of life? This
+simplicity was gone, irrecoverably gone, with the passage from nomad
+times to the complexities of a modern society. To typify, therefore, the
+Supreme Being as specially interested in shocks of grain and in
+shepherds and shepherdesses was to make him a mere figure in an idyll,
+the ornament of a rural mask, a god of the garden, instead of the
+sovereign director of the universal forces, and stern master of the
+destinies of men. Chaumette's commemoration of the Divinity of Reason
+was a sensible performance, compared with Robespierre's farcical
+repartee. It was something, as Comte has said, to select for worship
+man's most individual attribute. If they could not contemplate society
+as a whole, it was at least a gain to pay homage to that faculty in the
+human rulers of the world, which had brought the forces of nature--its
+pluviosity, nivosity, germinality, and vendemiarity--under the yoke for
+the service of men.
+
+If the philosophy of Robespierre's pageant was so retrograde and false,
+its politics were still more inane. It is a monument of presumptuous
+infatuation that any one should feel so strongly as he did that order
+could only be restored on condition of coming to terms with religious
+use and prejudice, and then that he should dream that his Supreme
+Being--a mere didactic phrase, the deity of a poet's georgic--should
+adequately replace that eternal marvel of construction, by means of
+which the great churchmen had wrought dogma and liturgy and priest and
+holy office into every hour and every mood of men's lives. There is no
+binding principle of human association in a creed with this one bald
+article. 'In truth,' as I have said elsewhere of such deism as
+Robespierre's, 'one can scarcely call it a creed. It is mainly a name
+for a particular mood of fine spiritual exaltation; the expression of a
+state of indefinite aspiration and supreme feeling for lofty things. Are
+you going to convert the new barbarians of our western world with this
+fair word of emptiness? Will you sweeten the lives of suffering men, and
+take its heaviness from that droning piteous chronicle of wrong and
+cruelty and despair, which everlastingly saddens the compassionating ear
+like moaning of a midnight sea; will you animate the stout of heart with
+new fire, and the firm of hand with fresh joy of battle, by the thought
+of a being without intelligible attributes, a mere abstract creation of
+metaphysic, whose mercy is not as our mercy, nor his justice as our
+justice, nor his fatherhood as the fatherhood of men? It was not by a
+cold, a cheerless, a radically depraving conception such as this, that
+the church became the refuge of humanity in the dark times of old, but
+by the representation, to men sitting in bondage and confusion, of
+godlike natures moving among them, under figure of the most eternally
+touching of human relations,--a tender mother ever interceding for them,
+and an elder brother laying down his life that their burdens might be
+loosened.'
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the day of the Feast of the Supreme Being, the guillotine was
+concealed in the folds of rich hangings. It was the Twentieth of
+Prairial. Two days later Couthon proposed to the Convention the
+memorable Law of the Twenty-second Prairial. Robespierre was the
+draftsman, and the text of it still remains in his own writing. This
+monstrous law is simply the complete abrogation of all law. Of all laws
+ever passed in the world it is the most nakedly iniquitous. Tyrants have
+often substituted their own will for the ordered procedure of a
+tribunal, but no tyrant before ever went through the atrocious farce of
+deliberately making a tribunal the organised negation of security for
+justice. Couthon laid its theoretic base in a fallacy that must always
+be full of seduction to shallow persons in authority: 'He who would
+subordinate the public safety to the inventions of jurisconsults, to the
+formulas of the Court, is either an imbecile or a scoundrel.' As if
+public safety could mean anything but the safety of the public. The
+author of the Law of Prairial had forgotten the minatory word of the
+sage to whom he had gone on a pilgrimage in the days of his youth. 'All
+becomes legitimate and even virtuous,' Helvetius had written, 'on behalf
+of the public safety.' Rousseau inscribed on the margin, 'The public
+safety is nothing, unless individuals enjoy security.' What security was
+possible under the Law of Prairial?
+
+After the probity and good judgment of the tribunal, the two cardinal
+guarantees in state trials are accurate definition, and proof. The
+offence must be capable of precise description, and the proof against
+an offender must conform to strict rule. The Law of Prairial violently
+infringed all three of these essential conditions of judicial equity.
+First, the number of the jury who had power to convict was reduced.
+Second, treason was made to consist in such vague and infinitely elastic
+kinds of action as inspiring discouragement, misleading opinion,
+depraving manners, corrupting patriots, abusing the principles of the
+Revolution by perfidious applications. Third, proof was to lie in the
+conscience of the jury; there was an end of preliminary inquiry, of
+witnesses in defence, and of counsel for the accused. Any kind of
+testimony was evidence, whether material or moral, verbal or written, if
+it was of a kind 'likely to gain the assent of a man of reasonable
+mind.'
+
+Now what was Robespierre's motive in devising this infernal instrument?
+The theory that he loved judicial murder for its own sake, can only be
+held by the silliest of royalist or clerical partisans. It is like the
+theory of the vulgar kind of Protestantism, that Mary Tudor or Philip of
+Spain had a keen delight in shedding blood. Robespierre, like Mary and
+like Philip, would have been as well pleased if all the world would have
+come round to his mind without the destruction of a single life. The
+true inquisitor is a creature of policy, not a man of blood by taste.
+What, then, was the policy that inspired the Law of Prairial? To us the
+answer seems clear. We know what was the general aim in Robespierre's
+mind at this point in the history of the Revolution. His brother
+Augustin was then the representative of the Convention with the army of
+Italy, and General Bonaparte was on terms of close intimacy with him.
+Bonaparte said long afterwards, when he was expiating a life of iniquity
+on the rock of Saint Helena, that he saw long letters from Maximilian to
+Augustin Robespierre, all blaming the Conventional Commissioners--Tallien,
+Fouche, Barras, Collot, and the rest--for the horrors they perpetrated,
+and accusing them of ruining the Revolution by their atrocities. Again,
+there is abundant testimony that Robespierre did his best to induce the
+Committee of Public Safety to bring those odious malefactors to justice.
+The text of the Law itself discloses the same object. The vague phrases of
+depraving manners and applying revolutionary principles perfidiously, were
+exactly calculated to smite the band of violent men whose conduct was to
+Robespierre the scandal of the Revolution. And there was a curious clause
+in the law as originally presented, which deprived the Convention of the
+right of preventing measures against its own members. Robespierre's general
+design in short was to effect a further purgation of the Convention. There
+is no reason to suppose that he deliberately aimed at any more general
+extermination. On the other hand, it is incredible that, as some have
+maintained, he should merely have had in view the equalisation of rich and
+poor before the tribunals, by withdrawing the aid of counsel and testimony
+to civic character from both rich and poor alike.
+
+If Robespierre's design was what we believe it to have been, the result
+was a ghastly failure. The Committee of Public Safety would not consent
+to apply his law against the men for whom he had specially designed it.
+The frightful weapon which he had forged was seized by the Committee of
+General Security, and Paris was plunged into the fearful days of the
+Great Terror. The number of persons put to death by the Revolutionary
+Tribunal before the Law of Prairial had been comparatively moderate.
+From the creation of the tribunal in April 1793, down to the execution
+of the Hebertists in March 1794, the number of persons condemned to
+death was 505. From the death of the Hebertists down to the death of
+Robespierre, the number of the condemned was 2158. One half of the
+entire number of victims, namely, 1356, were guillotined after the Law
+of Prairial. No deadlier instrument was ever invented by the cruelty of
+man. Innocent women no less than innocent men, poor no less than rich,
+those in whom life was almost spent, no less than those in whom its
+pulse was strongest, virtuous no less than vicious, were sent off in
+woe-stricken batches all those summer days. A man was informed against;
+he was seized in his bed at five in the morning; at seven he was taken
+to the Conciergerie; at nine he received information of the charge
+against him; at ten he went into the dock; by two in the afternoon he
+was condemned; by four his head lay in the executioner's basket.
+
+What stamps the system of the Terror at this date with a wickedness
+that cannot be effaced, is that at no moment was the danger from foreign
+or domestic foe less serious. We may always forgive something to
+well-grounded panic. The proscriptions of an earlier date in Paris were
+not excessively sanguinary, if we remember that the city abounded in
+royalists and other reactionists, who were really dangerous in fomenting
+discouragement and spreading confusion. If there ever is an excuse for
+martial law, and it must be rare, the French government were warranted
+in resorting to it in 1793. Paris in those days was like a city
+beleaguered, and the world does not use very harsh words about the
+commandant of a besieged town who puts to death traitors found within
+his walls. Opinion in England at this very epoch encouraged the Tory
+government to pass a Treason Bill, which introduced as vague a
+definition of treasonable offence as even the Law of Prairial itself.
+Windham did not shrink from declaring in parliament that he and his
+colleagues were determined to exact 'a rigour beyond the law.' And they
+were as good as their word. The Jacobins had no monopoly either of cruel
+law or cruel breach of law in the eighteenth century. Only thirty years
+before, opinion in Pennsylvania had prompted a hideous massacre of
+harmless Indians as a deed acceptable to God, and the grandson of
+William Penn proclaimed a bounty of fifty dollars for the scalp of a
+female Indian, and three times as much for a male. A man would have had
+quite as good a chance of justice from the Revolutionary Tribunal, as
+at the hands of Braxfield, the Scotch judge, who condemned Muir and
+Palmer for sedition in 1793, and who told the government, with a brazen
+front worthy of Carrier or Collot d'Herbois themselves, that, if they
+would only send him prisoners, he would find law for them.
+
+We have no sympathy with the spirit of paradox that has arisen in these
+days, amusing itself by the vindication of bad men. We think that the
+author of the Law of Prairial was a bad man. But it is time that there
+should be an end of the cant which lifts up its hands at the crimes of
+republicans and freethinkers, and shuts its eyes to the crimes of kings
+and churches. Once more, we ought to rise into a higher air; we ought to
+condemn, wherever we find it, whether on the side of our adversaries or
+on our own, all readiness to substitute arbitrary force for the
+processes of ordered justice. There are moments when such a readiness
+may be leniently judged, but Prairial of 1794 was not one of them either
+in France or in England. And what makes the crime of this law more
+odious, is its association with the official proclamation of the State
+worship of a Supreme Being. The scene of Robespierre's holy festival
+becomes as abominable as a catholic Auto-da-fe, where solemn homage was
+offered to the God of pity and loving-kindness, while flame glowed round
+the limbs of the victims.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Robespierre was inflamed with resentment, not because so many people
+were guillotined every day, but because the objects of his own enmity
+were not among them. He was chagrined at the miscarriage of his scheme;
+but the chagrin had its root in his desire for order, and not in his
+humanity. A good man--say so imperfectly good a man as Danton--could not
+have endured life, after enacting such a law, and seeing the ghastly
+work that it was doing. He could hardly have contented himself with
+drawing tears from the company in Madame Duplay's little parlour, by his
+pathetic recitations from Corneille and Racine, or with listening to
+melting notes from the violin of Le Bas. It is commonly said by
+Robespierre's defenders that he withdrew from the Committee of Public
+Safety, as soon as he found out that he was powerless to arrest the
+daily shedding of blood. The older assumption used to be that he left
+Paris, and ceased to be cognisant of the Committee's deliberations. The
+minutes, however, prove that this was not the case. Robespierre signed
+papers nearly every day of Messidor--(June 19 to July 18) the
+blood-stained month between Prairial and Thermidor--and was thoroughly
+aware of the doings of the Committee. His partisans have now fallen back
+on the singular theory of what they style moral absence. He was present
+in the flesh, but standing aloof in the spirit. His frowning silence was
+a deadlier rebuke to the slayers and oppressors than secession.
+Unfortunately for this ingenious explanation of the embarrassing fact of
+a merciful man standing silent before merciless doings, there are at
+least two facts that show its absurdity.
+
+First, there is the affair of Catherine Theot. Catherine Theot was a
+crazy old woman of a type that is commoner in protestant than in
+catholic countries. She believed herself to have special gifts in the
+interpretation of the holy writings, and a few other people as crazy as
+herself chose to accept her pretensions. One revelation vouchsafed to
+her was to the effect that Robespierre was a Messiah and the new
+redeemer of the human race. The Committee of General Security resolved
+to indict this absurd sect. Vadier,--one of the roughest of the men whom
+the insurrections of Paris had brought to the front--reported on the
+charges to the Convention (27 Prairial, June 15), and he took the
+opportunity to make Robespierre look profoundly ridiculous. The
+unfortunate Messiah sat on his bench, gnawing his lips with bitter rage,
+while, amid the sneers and laughter of the Convention, the officers
+brought to the bar the foolish creatures who had called him the Son of
+God. His thin pride and prudish self-respect were unutterably affronted,
+and he quite understood that the ridicule of the mysticism of Theot was
+an indirect pleasantry upon his own Supreme Being. He flew to the
+Committee of Public Safety, angrily reproached them for permitting the
+prosecution, summoned Fouquier-Tinville, and peremptorily ordered him to
+let the matter drop. In vain did the public prosecutor point out that
+there was a decree of the Convention ordering him to proceed.
+Robespierre was inexorable. The Committee of General Security were
+baffled, and the prosecution ended. 'Lutteur impuissant et fatigue,'
+says M. Hamel, the most thoroughgoing defender of Robespierre, upon
+this, 'il va se retirer, moralement du moins.' Impotent and wearied! But
+he had just won a most signal victory for good sense and humanity. Why
+was it the only one? If Robespierre was able to save Theot, why could he
+not save Cecile Renault?
+
+Cecile Renault was a young seamstress who was found one evening at the
+door of Robespierre's lodging, calling out in a state of exaltation that
+she would fain see what a tyrant looked like. She was arrested, and upon
+her were found two little knives used for the purposes of her trade.
+That she should be arrested and imprisoned was natural enough. The times
+were charged with deadly fire. People had not forgotten that Marat had
+been murdered in his own house. Only a few days before Cecile Renault's
+visit to Robespierre, an assassin had fired a pistol at Collot d'Herbois
+on the staircase of his apartment. We may make allowance for the
+excitement of the hour, and Robespierre had as much right to play the
+martyr, as had Lewis the Fifteenth after the incident of Damiens' rusty
+pen-knife. But the histrionic exigencies of the chief of a faction ought
+not to be pushed too far. And it was a monstrous crime that because
+Robespierre found it convenient to pose as sacrificial victim at the
+Club, therefore he should have had no scruple in seeing not only the
+wretched Cecile, but her father, her aunt, and one of her brothers, all
+despatched to the guillotine in the red shirt of parricide, as agents of
+Pitt and Coburg, and assassins of the father of the land. This was
+exactly two days after he had shown his decisive power in the affair of
+the religious illuminists. The only possible conclusion open to a plain
+man after weighing and putting aside all the sophisms with which this
+affair has been obscured, is that Robespierre interfered in the one case
+because its further prosecution would have tended to make him
+ridiculous, and he did not interfere in the other, because the more
+exaggerated, the more melodramatic, the more murderous it was made, the
+more interesting an object would he seem in the eyes of his adorers.
+
+The second fact bearing on Robespierre's humanity is this. He had
+encouraged the formation and stimulated the activity of popular
+commissions, who should provide victims for the Revolutionary Tribunal.
+On the Second of Messidor (June 20) a list containing one hundred and
+thirty-eight names was submitted for the ratification of the Committee.
+The Committee endorsed the bloody document, and the last signature of
+the endorsement is that of him, who had resigned a post in his youth
+rather than be a party to putting a man to death. As was observed at the
+time, Robespierre in doing this, suppressed his pique against his
+colleagues, in order to take part in a measure, that was a sort of
+complement to his Law of Prairial.
+
+From these two circumstances, then, even if there were no other, we are
+justified in inferring that Robespierre was struck by no remorse at the
+thought that it was his law which had unbound the hands of the horrible
+genie of civil murder. His mind was wholly absorbed in the calculations
+of a frigid egoism. His intelligence, as we have always to remember, was
+very dim. He only aimed at one thing at once, and that was seldom
+anything very great or far-reaching. He was a man of peering and
+obscured vision in face of practical affairs. In passing the Law of
+Prairial, his designs--and they were meritorious and creditable designs
+enough in themselves--had been directed against the corrupt chiefs, such
+as Tallien and Fouche, and against the fierce and coarse spirits of the
+Committee of General Security, such as Vadier and Voulland. Robespierre
+was above all things a precisian. He had a sentimental sympathy with the
+common people in the abstract, but his spiritual pride, his pedantry,
+his formalism, his personal fastidiousness, were all wounded to the very
+quick by the kind of men whom the Revolution had thrown to the surface.
+Gouverneur Morris, then the American minister, describes most of the
+members of the two Committees as the very dregs of humanity, with whom
+it is a stain to have any dealings; as degraded men only worthy of the
+profoundest contempt. Danton had said: 'Robespierre is the least of a
+scoundrel of any of the band.' The Committee of General Security
+represented the very elements by which Robespierre was most revolted.
+They offended his respectability; their evil manners seemed to tarnish
+that good name which his vanity hoped to make as revered all over
+Europe, as it already was among his partisans in France. It was
+indispensable therefore to cut them off from the revolutionary
+government, just as Hebert and as Danton had been cut off. His
+colleagues of Public Safety refused to lend themselves to this.
+Henceforth, with characteristically narrow tenacity, he looked round for
+new combinations, but, so far as I can see, with no broader design than
+to enable him to punish these particular objects of his very just
+detestation.
+
+The position of sections and interests which ended in the Revolution of
+Thermidor, is one of the most extraordinarily intricate and entangled in
+the history of faction. It would take a volume to follow out all the
+peripeteias of the drama. Here we can only enumerate in a few sentences
+the parties to the contest and the conditions of the game. The reader
+will easily discern the difficulty in Robespierre's way of making an
+effective combination. First, there were the two Committees. Of these
+the one, the General Security, was thoroughly hostile to Robespierre;
+its members, as we have said, were wild and hardy spirits, with no
+political conception, and with a great contempt for fine phrases and
+philosophical principles. They knew Robespierre's hatred for them, and
+they heartily returned it. They were the steadfast centre of the
+changing schemes which ended in his downfall. The Committee of Public
+Safety was divided. Carnot hated Saint Just, and Collot d'Herbois hated
+Robespierre, and Billaud had a sombre distrust of Robespierre's
+counsels. Shortly speaking, the object of the Billaudists was to retain
+their power, and their power was always menaced from two quarters, the
+Convention and Paris. If they let Robespierre have his own way against
+his enemies, would they not be at his mercy whenever he chose to devise
+a popular insurrection against them? Yet if they withstood Robespierre,
+they could only do so through the agency of the Convention, and to fall
+back upon the Convention would be to give that body an express
+invitation to resume the power that had, in the pressure of the crisis a
+year before, been delegated to the Committee, and periodically renewed
+afterwards. The dilemma of Billaud seemed desperate, and events
+afterwards proved that it was so.
+
+If we turn to the Convention, we find the position equally distracting.
+They, too, feared another insurrection and a second decimation. If the
+Right helped Robespierre to destroy the Fouches and Vadiers, he would be
+stronger than ever; and what security had they against a repetition of
+the violence of the Thirty-first of May? If the Dantonists joined in
+destroying Robespierre, they would be helping the Right, and what
+security had they against a Girondin reaction? On the other hand, the
+Centre might fairly hope, just what Billaud feared, that if the
+Committee came to the Convention to crush Robespierre, that would end in
+a combination strong enough to enable the Convention to crush the
+Committees.
+
+Much depended on military success. The victories of the generals were
+the great strength of the Committee. For so long it would be difficult
+to turn opinion against a triumphant administration. 'At the first
+defeat,' Robespierre had said to Barere, 'I await you.' But the defeat
+did not come. The plotting went on with incessant activity; on one hand,
+Robespierre, aided by Saint Just and Couthon, strengthening himself at
+the Jacobin Club, and through that among the sections; on the other, the
+Mountain and the Committee of General Security trying to win over the
+Right, more contemptuously christened the Marsh or the Belly, of the
+Convention. The Committee of Public Safety was not yet fully decided how
+to act.
+
+At the end of the first week of Thermidor, Robespierre could endure the
+tension no longer. He had tried to fortify his nerves for the struggle
+by riding, but with so little success that he was lifted off his horse
+fainting. He endeavoured to steady himself by diligent pistol-practice.
+But nothing gave him initiative and the sinews of action. Saint Just
+urged him to raise Paris. Some bold men proposed to carry off the
+members of the Committee bodily from their midnight deliberations.
+Robespierre declined, and fell back on what he took to be his greatest
+strength and most unfailing resource; he prepared a speech. On the
+Eighth of Thermidor he delivered it to the Convention, amid intense
+excitement both within its walls and without. All Paris knew that they
+were now on the eve of one more of the famous Days; the revolution of
+Thermidor had begun.
+
+The speech of the Eighth Thermidor has seemed to men of all parties
+since a masterpiece of tactical ineptitude. If Robespierre had been a
+statesman instead of a phrasemonger, he had a clear course. He ought to
+have taken the line of argument that Danton would have taken. That is to
+say, he ought to have identified himself fully with the interests and
+security of the Convention; to have accepted the growing resolution to
+close the Terror; to have boldly pressed the abolition of the Committee
+of General Security, and the removal from the Committee of Public Safety
+of Billaud, Collot, Barere; to have proposed to send about fifty persons
+to Cayenne for life; and to have urged a policy of peace with the
+foreign powers. This was the substantial wisdom and real interest of the
+position. The task was difficult, because his hearers had the best
+possible reasons for knowing that the author of the Law of Prairial was
+a Terrorist on principle. And in truth we know that Robespierre had no
+definite intention of erecting clemency into a rule. He had not mental
+strength enough to throw off the profound apprehension, which the
+incessant alarms of the last five years had engendered in him; and the
+only device, that he could imagine for maintaining the republic against
+traitors, was to stimulate the rigour of the Revolutionary Tribunal.
+
+If, however, Robespierre lacked the grasp which might have made him the
+representative of a broad and stable policy, it was at least his
+interest to persuade the men of the Plain that he entertained no designs
+against them. And this is what in his own mind he intended. But to do it
+effectively, it was clearly best to tell his hearers, in so many words,
+whom he really wished them to strike. That would have relieved the
+majority, and banished the suspicion which had been busily fomented by
+his enemies, that he had in his pocket a long list of their names, for
+proscription. But Robespierre, having for the first time in his life
+ventured on aggressive action without the support of a definite party,
+faltered. He dared not to designate his enemies face to face and by
+name. Instead of that, he talked vaguely of conspirators against the
+republic, and calumniators of himself. There was not a single bold,
+definite, unmistakable sentence in the speech from first to last. The
+men of the Plain were insecure and doubtful; they had no certainty that
+among conspirators and calumniators he did not include too many of
+themselves. People are not so readily seized by grand phrases, when
+their heads are at stake. The sitting was long, and marked by changing
+currents and reverses. When they broke up, all was left uncertain.
+Robespierre had suffered a check. Billaud felt that he could no longer
+hesitate in joining the combination against his colleague. Each party
+was aware that the next day must seal the fate of one or other of them.
+There is a legend that in the evening Robespierre walked in the Champs
+Elysees with his betrothed, accompanied as usual by his faithful dog,
+Brount. They admired the purple of the sunset, and talked of the
+prospect of a glorious to-morrow. But this is apocryphal. The evening
+was passed in no lover's saunterings, but amid the storm and uproar of
+the Club. He went to the Jacobins to read over again his speech of the
+day. 'It is my testament of death,' he said, amid the passionate
+protestations of his devoted followers. He had been talking for the last
+three years of his willingness to drink the hemlock, and to offer his
+breast to the poniards of tyrants. That was a fashion of the speech of
+the time, and in earlier days it had been more than a fashion of speech,
+for Brunswick would have given them short shrift. But now, when he
+talked of his last testament, Robespierre did not intend it to be so if
+he could prevent it. When he went to rest that night, he had a tolerably
+calm hope that he should win the next day's battle in the Convention,
+when he was aware that Saint Just would attack the Committees openly and
+directly. If he would have allowed his band to invade the Pavillon de
+Flore, and carry off or slay the Committees who sat up through the
+night, the battle would have been won when he awoke. His friends are
+justified in saying that his strong respect for legality was the cause
+of his ruin.
+
+Men in all ages have had a superstitious fondness for connecting awful
+events in their lives with portents and signs among the outer elements.
+It was noticed that the heat during the terrible days of Thermidor was
+more intense than had been known within the memory of man. The
+thermometer never fell below sixty-five degrees in the coolest part of
+the night, and in the daytime men and women and beasts of burden fell
+down dead in the streets. By five o'clock in the morning of the Ninth
+Thermidor, the galleries of the Convention were filled by a boisterous
+and excited throng. At ten o'clock the proceedings began as usual with
+the reading of correspondence from the departments and from the armies.
+Robespierre, who had been escorted from his lodgings by the usual body
+of admirers, instead of taking his ordinary seat, remained standing by
+the side of the tribune. It is a familiar fact that moments of appalling
+suspense are precisely those in which we are most ready involuntarily to
+note a trifle; everybody observed that Robespierre wore the coat of
+violet-blue silk and the white nankeens in which a few weeks previously
+he had done honour to the Supreme Being.
+
+The galleries seemed as enthusiastic as ever. The men of the Plain and
+the Marsh had lost the abject mien with which they usually cowered
+before Robespierre's glance; they wore a courageous air of judicial
+reserve. The leaders of the Mountain wandered restlessly to and fro
+among the corridors. At noon Tallien saw that Saint Just had ascended
+the tribune. Instantly he rushed down into the chamber, knowing that
+the battle had now begun in fierce earnest. Saint Just had not got
+through two sentences, before Tallien interrupted him. He began to
+insist with energy that there should be an end to the equivocal phrases
+with which Paris had been too long alarmed by the Triumvirate. Billaud,
+fearing to be outdone in the attack, hastily forced his way to the
+tribune, broke into what Tallien was saying, and proceeded dexterously
+to discredit Robespierre's allies without at once assailing Robespierre
+himself. Le Bas ran in a fury to stop him; Collot d'Herbois, the
+president, declared Le Bas out of order; the hall rang with cries of 'To
+prison! To the Abbey!' and Le Bas was driven from the tribune. This was
+the beginning of the tempest. Robespierre's enemies knew that they were
+fighting for their lives, and this inspired them with a strong and
+resolute power that is always impressive in popular assemblies. He still
+thought himself secure. Billaud pursued his accusations. Robespierre, at
+last, unable to control himself, scaled the tribune. There suddenly
+burst forth from Tallien and his partisans vehement shouts of 'Down with
+the tyrant! down with the tyrant!' The galleries were swept by a wild
+frenzy of vague agitation; the president's bell poured loud incessant
+clanging into the tumult; the men of the Plain held themselves firm and
+silent; in the tribune raged ferocious groups, Tallien menacing
+Robespierre with a dagger, Billaud roaring out proposals to arrest this
+person and that Robespierre gesticulating, threatening, yelling,
+shrieking. His enemies knew that if he were once allowed to get a
+hearing, his authority might even yet overawe the waverers. A
+penetrative word or a heroic gesture might lose them the day. The
+majority of the chamber still hesitated. They called for Barere, in
+whose adroit faculty for discovering the winning side they had the
+confidence of long experience. Robespierre, recovering some of his calm,
+and perceiving now that he had really to deal with a serious revolt,
+again asked to be heard before Barere. But the cries for Barere were
+louder than ever. Barere spoke, in a sense hostile to Robespierre, but
+warily and without naming him.
+
+Then there was a momentary lull. The Plain was uncertain. The battle
+might even now turn either way. Robespierre made another attempt to
+speak, but Tallien with intrepid fury broke out into a torrent of louder
+and more vehement invective. Robespierre's shrill voice was heard in
+disjected snatches, amidst the violent tones of Tallien, the yells of
+the president calling Robespierre to order, the murderous clanging of
+the bell. Then came that supreme hour of the struggle, whose tale has
+been so often told, when Robespierre turned from his old allies of the
+Mountain, and succeeded in shrieking out an appeal to the probity and
+virtue of the Right and the Plain. To his horror, even these despised
+men, after a slight movement, remained mute. Then his cheeks blanched,
+and the sweat ran down his face. But anger and scornful impatience
+swiftly came back and restored him. _President of assassins_, he cried
+out to Thuriot, _for the last time I ask to be heard. Thou canst not
+speak_, called one, _the blood of Danton chokes thee_. He flung himself
+down the steps of the tribune, and rushed towards the benches of the
+Right. _Come no further_, cried another, _Vergniaud and Condorcet sat
+here_. He regained the tribune, but his speech was gone. He was reduced
+to the dregs of an impotent and gasping voiceless gesticulation, like
+the strife of one in a nightmare.
+
+The day was lost. The tension of a passionate and violent struggle
+prolonged for many hours always at length exasperates onlookers with
+something of the brute ferocity of the actors. The physical strain stirs
+the tiger in the blood; they conceive a cruel hatred against weakness,
+just as the heated throng of a Roman amphitheatre turned up their thumbs
+for the instant despatch of the unfortunate swordsman who had been too
+ready to lower his arms. The Right, the Plain, even the galleries,
+despised the man who had succumbed. If Robespierre had possessed the
+physical strength of Mirabeau or Danton, the Ninth Thermidor would have
+been another of his victories. He was crushed by the relentless ferocity
+and endurance of his antagonists. A decree for his arrest was resolved
+upon by acclamation. He cast a glance at the galleries, as marvelling
+that they should remain passive in face of an outrage on his person.
+They were mute. The ushers advanced with hesitation to do their duty,
+and not without trembling carried him away, along with Couthon and
+Saint Just. The brother, for whom he had made honourable sacrifices in
+days that seemed to be divided from the present by an abyss of
+centuries, insisted with fine heroism on sharing his fate, and Augustin
+Robespierre and Le Bas were led off to the prisons along with their
+leader and idol.
+
+It was now a little after four o'clock. The Convention, with the
+self-possession that so often amazes us in its proceedings, went on with
+formal business for another hour. At five they broke up. For life, as
+the poets tell, is a daily stage-play; men declaim their high heroic
+parts, then doff the buskin or the sock, wash away the paint from their
+cheeks, and gravely sit down to meat. The Conventionals, as they ate
+their dinners, were unconscious, apparently, that the great crisis of
+the drama was still to come. The next twelve hours were to witness the
+climax. Robespierre had been crushed by the Convention; it remained to
+be seen whether the Convention would not now be crushed by the Commune
+of Paris.
+
+Robespierre was first conducted to the prisons of the Luxembourg. The
+gaoler, on some plea of informality, refused to receive him. The
+terrible prisoner was next taken to the Mairie, where he remained among
+joyful friends from eight in the evening until eleven. Meanwhile the old
+insurrectionary methods of the nights of June and of August in '92, of
+May and of June in '93, were again followed. The beating of the _rappel_
+and the _generale_ was heard in all the sections; the tocsin sounded its
+dreadful note, reminding all who should hear it that insurrection is
+the most sacred and the most indispensable of duties. Hanriot, the
+commandant of the forces, had been arrested in the evening, but he was
+speedily released by the agents of the Commune. The Council issued
+manifestoes and decrees from the Common Hall every moment. The barriers
+were closed. Cannon were posted opposite the doors of the hall of the
+Convention. The quays were thronged. Emissaries sped to and fro between
+the Jacobin Club and the Common Hall, and between these two centres and
+each of the forty-eight sections. It is one of the inscrutable mysteries
+of this delirious night, that Hanriot did not at once use the force at
+his command to break up the Convention. There is no obvious reason why
+he should not have done so. The members of the Convention had
+re-assembled after their dinner, towards seven o'clock. The hall which
+had resounded with the shrieks and yells of the furious gladiators of
+the factions all day, now lent a lugubrious echo to gloomy reports which
+one member after another delivered from the shadow of the tribune.
+Towards nine o'clock the members of the two dread Committees came in
+panic to seek shelter among their colleagues, 'as dejected in their
+peril,' says an eyewitness, 'as they had been cruel and insolent in the
+hour of their supremacy.' When they heard that Hanriot had been
+released, and that guns were at their door, all gave themselves up for
+lost and made ready for death. News came that Robespierre had broken his
+arrest and gone to the Common Hall. Robespierre, after urgent and
+repeated solicitations, had been at length persuaded about an hour
+before midnight to leave the Mairie and join his partisans of the
+Commune. This was an act of revolt against the Convention, for the
+Mairie was a legal place of detention, and so long as he was there, he
+was within the law. The Convention with heroic intrepidity declared both
+Hanriot and Robespierre beyond the pale of the law. This prompt measure
+was its salvation. Twelve members were instantly named to carry the
+decree to all the sections. With the scarf of office round their waists,
+and a sabre in hand, they sallied forth. Mounting horses, and escorted
+by attendants with flaring torches, they scoured Paris, calling all good
+citizens to the succour of the Convention, haranguing crowds at the
+street corners with power and authority, and striking the imaginations
+of men. At midnight heavy rain began to fall.
+
+The leaders of the Commune meanwhile, in full confidence that victory
+was sure, contented themselves with incessant issue of paper decrees, to
+each of which the Convention replied by a counter-decree. Those who have
+studied the situation most minutely, are of opinion that even so late as
+one o'clock in the morning, the Commune might have made a successful
+defence, although it had lost the opportunity, which it had certainly
+possessed up to ten o'clock, of destroying the Convention. But on this
+occasion the genius of insurrection slumbered. And there was a genuine
+division of opinion in the eastern quarters of Paris, the result of a
+grim distrust of the man who had helped to slay Hebert and Chaumette. At
+a word this distrust began to declare itself. The opinion of the
+sections became more and more distracted. One armed group cried, _Down
+with the Convention!_ Another armed group cried, _The Convention for
+ever, and down with the Commune!_ The two great faubourgs were all
+astir, and three battalions were ready to march. Emissaries from the
+Convention actually succeeded in persuading them--such the dementia of
+the night--that Robespierre was a royalist agent, and that the Commune
+were about to deliver the little Lewis from his prison in the Temple.
+One body of communist partisans after another was detached from its
+allegiance. The deluge of rain emptied the Place de Greve, and when
+companies came up from the sections in obedience to orders from Hanriot
+and the Commune, the silence made them suspect a trap, and they withdrew
+towards the great metropolitan church or elsewhere.
+
+Barras, whom the Convention had charged with its military defence,
+gathered together some six thousand men. With the right instinct of a
+man who had studied the history of Paris since the July of 1789, he
+foresaw the advantage of being the first to make the attack. He arranged
+his forces into two divisions. One of them marched along the quays to
+take the Common Hall in front; the other along the Rue Saint Honore to
+take it in flank. Inside the Common Hall the staircases and corridors
+were alive with bustling messengers, and those mysterious busybodies who
+are always found lingering without a purpose on the skirts of great
+historic scenes. Robespierre and the other chiefs were in a small room,
+preparing manifestoes and signing decrees. They were curiously unaware
+of the movements of the Convention. An aggressive attack by the party of
+authority upon the party of insurrection was unknown in the tradition of
+revolt. They had an easy assurance that at daybreak their forces would
+be prepared once more to tramp along the familiar road westwards. It was
+now half-past two. Robespierre had just signed the first two letters of
+his name to a document before him, when he was startled by cries and
+uproar in the Place below. In a few instants he lay stretched on the
+ground, his jaw shattered by a pistol-shot. His brother had either
+fallen or had leaped out of the window. Couthon was hurled over a
+staircase, and lay for dead. Saint Just was a prisoner.
+
+Whether Robespierre was shot by an officer of the Conventional force, or
+attempted to blow out his own brains, we shall never know, any more than
+we shall ever be quite assured how Rousseau, his spiritual master, came
+to an end. The wounded man was carried, a ghastly sight, first to the
+Committee of Public Safety, and then to the Conciergerie, where he lay
+in silent stupefaction through the heat of the summer day. As he was an
+outlaw, the only legal preliminary before execution was to identify
+him. At five in the afternoon, he was raised into the cart Couthon and
+the younger Robespierre lay, confused wrecks of men, at the bottom of
+it. Hanriot and Saint Just, bruised, begrimed, and foul, completed the
+band. One who walks from the Palace of Justice, over the bridge, along
+the Rue Saint Honore, into the Rue Royale, and so to the Luxor column,
+retraces the _via dolorosa_ of the Revolution on the afternoon of the
+Tenth of Thermidor.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The end of the intricate manoeuvres known as the Revolution of
+Thermidor was the recovery of authority by the Convention. The
+insurrections, known as the days of the Twelfth Germinal, First
+Prairial, and Thirteenth Vendemiaire, all ended in the victory of the
+Convention over the revolutionary forces of Paris. The Committees, on
+the other hand, had beaten Robespierre, but they had ruined themselves.
+Very gradually the movement towards order, which had begun in the mind
+of Danton, and had gone on in the cloudy purposes of Robespierre, became
+definite. But it was in the interest of very different ideas from those
+of either Danton or of Robespierre. A White Terror succeeded the Red
+Terror. Not at once, however; it was not until nine months after the
+death of Robespierre, that the reaction was strong enough to smite his
+colleagues of the two Committees. The surviving Girondins had come back
+to their seats in the Convention: the Dantonians had not forgiven the
+execution of their chief. These two parties were bent on vengeance. In
+April, 1795, a decree was passed banishing Billaud de Varennes, Collot
+d'Herbois, and Barere. In the following month the leaders of the
+Committee of General Security were thrown into prison. The revolution
+had passed into new currents. We cannot see any reasons for thinking
+that those currents would have led to any happier results if Robespierre
+had won the battle. Tallien, Fouche, Barras, and the rest may have been
+thoroughly bad men. But then what qualities had Robespierre for building
+up a state? He had neither strength of practical character, nor firm
+breadth of political judgment, nor a sound social doctrine. When we
+compare him,--I do not say with Frederick of Prussia, with Jefferson,
+with Washington,--but with the group of able men who made the closing
+year of the Convention honourable and of good service to France, we have
+a measure of Robespierre's profound and pitiable incompetence.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3), by John Morley
+
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