THERMIDOR
Danton had fallen fast in popularity and influence since the moment
when, after the fall of the Gironde, he had appeared to dominate the
situation. On the 12th of October, weary, sick at heart, disgusted at
the triumph of the Hébertists, he had left Paris and, apparently
retiring from politics, had gone back to his little country town of
Arcis-sur-Aube. There a month later Robespierre sought him out, and
invited him to joint action for pulling down Hébert. With Robespierre
this meant no more than that Danton could help him, not that he would
ever help Danton, and doubtless the latter realized it; but the bold
course always drew him, and he accepted. Danton returned to Paris on
the 21st of November.
Robespierre had been moved to this step by an alarming development of
Hébertism. Anti-clericalism, hatred of the priest,--and among other
things the priest stood behind the {203} Vendéen,--Voltairianism,
materialism, all these elements had come to a head; and the clique who
worked the Commune had determined that the triumph of the Revolution
demanded the downfall of Catholicism, which was, as it seemed,
equivalent to religion. A wave of atheism swept through Paris. To be
atheistic became the mark of a good citizen. Gobel, the archbishop,
and many priests, accepted it, and renounced the Church. Then a
further step was taken. On the 10th of November the Cathedral of Notre
Dame was dedicated to Reason, a handsome young woman from the opera
personifying the goddess. Two weeks later, just as Danton reached
Paris, the Commune closed all the churches of the city for the purpose
of dedicating them to the cult of Reason.
Robespierre, like most of the men of the Revolution, was an enemy of
the Church; but he was not an atheist. On the contrary he accepted in
a very literal, dogmatic and zealous way the doctrines of Rousseau, his
prophet not only in politics but in religion. To Robespierre the
Hébertist cult of Reason was as gross blasphemy as it was to the most
ardent Catholic, and the Jacobin leader had nerved himself for a
struggle to destroy that cult. That was why he had appealed to Danton,
{204} though he knew that if Danton joined him in the fight it would
not be for conscience, for a religious motive, but solely to destroy
Hébert and perhaps to regain control of the Committee of Public Safety.
This last possibility Robespierre risked.
The two allies immediately opened their campaign against Hébert. In
the Convention Danton, with rather hollow rhetoric, declaimed in favour
of popular festivals at which incense should be offered to the Supreme
Being. Robespierre at the Jacobins, allowing his venom to master his
logic, declared: "Atheism is aristocratic. The idea of a Supreme Being
who guards injured innocence and who punishes triumphant crime is
democratic. . . . If God did not exist we should have to invent Him."
It was just at this moment, when Hébertism and terrorism appeared
interchangeable terms, and when the two most powerful men of the
assembly had simultaneously turned against Hébertism, that Desmoulins
stepped forward as the champion of the cause of mercy, to pull down
Hébert, and with Hébert the guillotine. Early in December he brought
out a newspaper once more, _Le Vieux Cordelier_, and in that boldly
attacked the gang of thieves and {205} murderers who were working the
politics of the city of Paris. Public opinion awakened; voices were
raised here and there; presently petitions began to flow in to the
Convention. The tide was unloosened. How far would it go?
Robespierre, crafty, cunning, shifty, at first cautiously used
Desmoulins for his purposes. But when Danton himself, the
arch-terrorist, bravely accepted the doctrine of clemency, Robespierre
began to draw back. At the end of December the return of Collot
d'Herbois from his massacres at Lyons stiffened Robespierre, and
rallied the Committee of Public Safety more firmly to the policy of
terror. For some weeks a desperate campaign of words was fought out
inch by inch, Danton and Desmoulins lashing out desperately as the net
closed slowly in on them; and it was not till the 20th of February 1794
that they received the death stroke. It was dealt by St. Just.
St. Just, a doctrinaire and puritan nearly as fanatical as his chief,
possessed what Robespierre lacked,--decision, boldness, and a keen
political sense. On his return from a mission to the armies he had
found in Paris the situation already described, and decided immediately
to strike hard, at once, and at all the {206} opponents of his party.
The first measures were aimed at Hébert and the Commune, for St. Just
judged that they were ripe for the guillotine. A decree was pushed
through the Convention whereby it was ordered that the property of all
individuals sent to the scaffold under the _Loi des suspects_ should be
distributed to the poor _sans-culottes_. This infamous enactment was
intended to cut from under the feet of the Commune any popular support
it still retained.
At St. Just's provocation the attacked party closed its ranks,--the
Commune, the ministers, the Cordeliers, Hébert, Hanriot. Proclamations
were issued for a new insurrection. But Paris was getting weary of
insurrections, wearier still of the obvious blackguardism and
peculation of the Hébertists, weariest of the perpetual drip of blood
from the guillotine. No insurrection could be organized. For some
days the opponents remained at arm's length. Finally on the 17th of
March the Committee of Public Safety ordered the arrest of Hébert,
Pache, Chaumette and a number of their prominent supporters, and was
almost surprised to find that the arrest was carried out with virtually
no opposition. Paris raised not a finger to defend them, and
contentedly {207} watched them go to the guillotine a week later.
It was otherwise with Danton. St. Just gave him no time. With the
Committee and the Convention well in hand he struck at once, less than
a week after Hébert had been despatched. He read a long accusation
against Danton to the Convention, and that body weakly voted his
arrest. Danton, Desmoulins, and some of their chief supporters were
hurried to prison; and from prison to the Revolutionary Tribunal. On
the 2d, 3rd and 4th of April they were tried by the packed bench and
packed jury of that expeditious institution. But so uncertain was the
temper of the vast throng that filled the streets outside, so violently
did Danton struggle to burst his bonds, that for a moment it seemed as
though the immense reverberations of his voice, heard, it is said, even
across the Seine, might awaken the force of the people, as so often
before, and overthrow the Jacobin rule. A hasty message to the
Committee of Public Safety,--a hasty decree rushed through the
Convention,--and Danton's voice was quelled, judgment delivered before
the accused had finished his defence. On the next day Danton and
Desmoulins went to the guillotine together,--Paris very hushed at the
immensity and suddenness {208} of the catastrophe. Desmoulins was
gone, the leader of the revolt against the monarchy in 1789, the
generous defender of the cause of mercy in 1794; and Danton was gone,
with all his sins, with all his venality, the most powerful figure of
the Revolution, more nearly the Revolution itself than any man of his
time.
Complete triumph! As Robespierre, St. Just and Couthon looked about
them, the three apostles leading France down the narrow path of civic
virtue, they saw nothing but prostrate enemies. The power of the
Commune was gone, and in its stead the Committee of Public Safety
virtually ruled Paris. Danton, the possible dictator, the impure man
ready to adjust compromises with the enemies of liberty, lax in
conscience and in action, Danton too was down. The solid phalanx of
the Jacobin Club, the remnant of the Commune, the Revolutionary
Tribunal, stood solidly arrayed behind Robespierre; and the Convention
voted with perfect regularity and unanimity every decree it was asked
for.
But this attitude of the Convention only represented the momentary
paralysis of fear. No one would venture on debate, leave alone
opposition. Men like Sieyès attended punctiliously day after day,
month after month, and {209} never opened their lips,--only their eyes,
watching the corner of the Mountain, whence the reeking oracle was
delivered. In the city it was the same. The cafés, so tumultuous and
excited at the opening of the Revolution, are oppressively silent now.
A crowd gathers in the evening to hear the gazette read, but in that
crowd few dare to venture a word, an opinion; occasional whispers are
exchanged, the list of those sent to the guillotine is eagerly listened
to, and then all disperse.
And the prisons are full,--of aristocrats, of suspects, of wealthy
bourgeois. Those who have money occasionally buy themselves out, and
generally succeed in living well; while outside the prison doors,
angry, half-demented women revile the aristocrats who betray the people
and who, even in prison, eat delicate food and drink expensive wines.
Among the prisoners there is some light-heartedness, much
demoralization, with here and there, at rare intervals, a Madame Roland
or an André Chénier, to keep high above degradation their minds and
their characters. And every day comes the heartrending hour of the
roll call for the Revolutionary Tribunal which with so many means death.
The Tribunal itself, loses more and more {210} any sense of legality it
had at the outset. Its procedure still carries a semblance of legal
method, but it is really an automatic machine for affixing a legal
label on political murders. And the Tribunal, as it progresses in its
career, becomes more and more insane in its hatred of the party it
seeks to destroy, of the anti-revolutionist, of the aristocrat. Is it
not recorded that it ordered the arrest of a little girl of 13, Mlle.
de Chabannes, suspect "because she had sucked the aristocratic milk of
her mother." The Tribunal acquitted one person in every five; up to
the fall of Danton it had sent about 1,000 persons to the guillotine;
during the three months of Robespierre's domination it was to send
another 1,600, increasing its activity by hysterical progression. When
Thermidor was reached, about thirty individuals was the daily toll of
the executioner.
Robespierre triumphant immediately revealed all his limitations; he was
not a successful statesman; he was only a successful religionist. His
first care, therefore, was to attend to the dogma of the French people.
He proposed that Décadi should be converted into a new Sabbath; he
caused the dregs of the Hébertists, including Gobel, to be indicted for
{211} atheism when their turn came for the Revolutionary Tribunal.
Robespierre sending a renegade Archbishop of Paris to the scaffold for
atheism marks how very far the Revolution had moved since the days of
the States-General at Versailles.
On the 7th of May, a month after Danton's death, Robespierre delivered
a long speech before the Convention, a speech that marks his apogee.
It was a high-flown rhapsody on civic morality and purism. Voltaire
and the Encyclopedists were bitterly attacked; Jean Jacques Rousseau
was deified. The State should adopt his religious attitude, his
universal church of nature. In that church, nature herself is the
chief priest and there is no need of an infamous priesthood. Its
ritual is virtue; its festivals the joy of a great people. Therefore
let the Convention decree that the Cult of the Supreme Being be
established, that the duty of every citizen is to practise virtue, to
punish tyrants and traitors, to succour the unfortunate, to respect the
weak, to defend the oppressed, to do good unto others. Let the
Convention institute competitions for hymns and songs to adorn the new
cult; and let the Committee of {212} Public Safety,--that harassed and
overburdened committee,--adjudicate, and reward the successful
hymnologists.
The Convention listened in silence, disgust, silent rebellion,--but
bowed its head. The new cult appealed to very few. Here and there an
intellectual Rousseauist accepted it, but the mass did what mankind in
all countries and ages has done, refused to reason out what was a
religious and therefore an emotional question. To the vast majority of
Frenchmen there was only one choice, Catholicism or non-catholicism,
and the cult of the Supreme Being was just as much non-catholicism as
that of Reason.
Robespierre, blind and satisfied, went on his way rejoicing. On the
8th of June, as President of the Convention, he took the chief part in
a solemn inauguration of the new religion. There were statues,
processions, bonfires, speeches, and Robespierre, beflowered, radiant
in a new purple coat, pontificating over all. But beneath the surface
all was not well. The Convention had not been led through the solemn
farce without protest. Words of insult were hissed by more than one
deputy as Robespierre passed within earshot, and the Jacobin leader
realized fully that behind the {213} docile votes and silent faces
currents of rage and protest were stirring. For this, as for every
ill, there was but one remedy, to sharpen the knife.
Two days later, on the 10th, new decrees were placed before the
Convention for intensifying the operations of the Revolutionary
Tribunal. New crimes were invented "spreading discouragement,
perverting public opinion"; the prisoner's defence was practically
taken away from him; and, most important, members of the Convention
lost their inviolability. The Convention voted the decree, but terror
had now pushed it to the wall and self-defence automatically sprang up.
From that moment the Convention nerved itself to the inevitable
struggle. Billaud, Collot and Barère, the _impures_ of the Committee
of Public Safety, looked despairingly on all sides of the Convention
for help to rid themselves of the monster, whose tentacles they already
felt beginning to twine about them.
Just at this critical moment a trivial incident arose that pierced
Robespierre's armour in its weakest joint, and that crystallized the
fear of the Convention into ridicule,--ridicule that proved the
precursor of revolt. Catherine Théot, a female spiritualist, or
medium, as we {214} should call her at the present day, highly elated
at the triumph of the Supreme Being over the unemotional Goddess of
Reason, had made Robespierre the hero of her half-insane inspirations.
She now announced to her credulous devotees that she was the mother of
God, and that Robespierre was her son. It became the sensation of the
day. Profiting by the temporary absence of St. Just with the army in
the Netherlands, the Committee of Public Safety decided that Catherine
Théot was a nuisance and a public danger, and must be arrested.
Robespierre, intensely susceptible to ridicule, not knowing what to do,
pettishly withdrew from the Convention, confined himself to his house
and the Jacobin Club, and left the Committee to carry out its
intention. Every member of the Convention realized that this was a
distinct move against Robespierre.
St. Just was with Jourdan's army in the north, and for the moment all
eyes were fixed on that point. The campaign of 1794 might be decisive.
France and Austria had put great armies in the field. The latter now
controlled the belt of frontier fortresses, and if, pushing beyond
these, she destroyed the French army, Paris and the Revolution might
soon be at an end. As the campaign opened, {215} however, fortune took
her place with the tricolour flag. Minor successes fell to Moreau,
Souham, Macdonald, Vandamme. In June the campaign culminated. The
armies met south of Brussels at Fleurus on the 25th of that month. For
fifteen hours the battle raged, Kléber with the French right wing
holding his ground, the centre and left slowly driven back. But at the
close of the day the French, not to be denied, came again. Jourdan,
with St. Just by his side, drove his troops to a last effort, regained
the lost ground, and more. The Austrians gave way, turned to flight,
and one of the great victories of the epoch had been won. In a few
hours the glorious news had reached Paris, and in Paris it was
interpreted as an evil portent for Robespierre.
For if there existed something that could possibly be described as a
justification for terrorism, that something was national danger and
national fear. Ever since the month of July 1789 there had been a
perfect correspondence between military pressure on Paris and the
consequent outbreak of violence. But this great victory, Fleurus,
seemed to mark the complete triumph of the armies of the Republic; all
danger had been swept away, so {216} why should terror and the
guillotine continue? As the captured Austrian standards were paraded
in the Tuileries gardens and presented to the Convention on a lovely
June afternoon, every inclination, every instinct was for rejoicing and
good will. The thought that the cart was still steadily, lugubriously,
wending its way to the insatiable guillotine, appeared unbearable.
From this moment the fever of conspiracy against Robespierre coursed
rapidly through the Convention. Some, like Sieyès, were statesmen,
and judged that the turn of the tide had come. Others, like Tallien or
Joseph Chénier, were touched in their family,--a brother, a wife, a
sister, awaiting judgment and the guillotine. Others feared; others
hoped; and yet others had vengeance to satisfy, especially the remnants
of Danton's, of Brissot's and of Hébert's party. St. Just saw the
danger of the situation and attempted to cow opposition. He spoke
threateningly of the necessity for a dictatorship and for a long list
of proscriptions.
It was the most silent member of the Committee of Public Safety,
Carnot, who brought on the crisis. Affecting an exclusive concern for
the conduct of the war and perfunctorily {217} signing all that related
to internal affairs, he was secretly restive and anxious to escape from
the horrible situation. Prompted by some of his colleagues, he
ordered, on the 24th of July, that the Paris national guard artillery
should go to the front. This was taking the decisive arm out of the
hands of Hanriot, for Hanriot had made his peace with Robespierre, had
survived the fall of Hébert, and was still in command of the national
guard.
There could be no mistaking the significance of Carnot's step. On the
same night Couthon loudly denounced it at the Jacobins, and the club
decided that it would petition the Convention to take action against
Robespierre's enemies. Next day Barère replied. He read a long speech
to the Convention in which, without venturing names, he blamed citizens
who were not heartened by the victories of the army and who meditated
further proscriptions. On the 26th, the 8th of Thermidor, Robespierre
reappeared in the assembly, and ascended the tribune to reply to Barère.
Robespierre felt that the tide was flowing against him; instinct,
premonitions, warned him that perhaps his end was not far off. In this
speech--it was to be his last before the Convention--the melancholy
note prevailed. {218} There was no effort to conciliate, no attempt at
being politic, only a slightly disheartened tone backed by the
iteration which France already knew so well:--the remedy for the evil
must be sought in purification; the Convention, the Committee of Public
Safety, must be purged.
Under the accustomed spell the Convention listened to the end. The
usual motions were put. Robespierre left the assembly. It was voted
that his speech should be printed; and that it should be posted in all
the communes of France. For a moment it looked as though the iron yoke
were immovably fixed. Then Cambon went to the tribune, and ventured to
discuss Robespierre's views. Billaud followed. And presently the
Convention, hardly realizing what it had done, rescinded the second of
its two votes. Robespierre's speech should be printed, but it should
not be placarded on the walls.
At the Jacobin Club the rescinded vote of the Convention conveyed a
meaning not to be mistaken. Robespierre repeated his Convention
speech, which was greeted with acclamations. Billaud and Collot were
received with hoots and groans, were driven out, and were erased from
the list of members. Through the night {219} the Jacobins were beating
up their supporters, threatening insurrection; and on their side the
leaders of the revolt attempted to rally the members of the Convention
to stand firmly by them.
The next day was the 9th of Thermidor. St. Just made a bold attempt to
control the situation. Early in the morning he met his colleagues of
the Committee of Public Safety and, making advances to them, promised
to lay before them a scheme that would reconcile all the divergent
interests of the Convention. While the Committee awaited his arrival
he proceeded to the body of the Convention, obtained the tribune, and
began a speech. Realizing how far the temper of the assembly was
against him, he boldly opened by denouncing the personal ambitions of
Robespierre, and by advocating moderate courses--but he had not gone
far when the members of the Committee, discovering the truth, returned
to the Convention, and set to work with the help of the revolted
members, to disconcert him. St. Just had perhaps only one weakness,
but it was fatal to him on the 9th of Thermidor, for it was a weakness
of voice. He was silenced by interruptions that constantly grew
stormier. Billaud followed him {220} and made an impassioned attack on
the Jacobins. Robespierre attempted to reply. But Collot d'Herbois
was presiding, and Collot declined to give Robespierre the tribune.
The din arose; shouts of "Down with the tyrant, down with the
dictator," were raised. Tallien demanded a decree of accusation.
Members pressed around the Jacobin leader, who at this last extremity
tried to force his way to the tribune. But the way was barred; he
could only clutch the railings, and, asking for death, looking in
despair at the public galleries that had so long shouted their Jacobin
approval to him, he kept crying: "La mort! la mort!" He had fallen.
The whole Convention was roaring when Collot from the presidential
chair announced the vote whereby Robespierre, St. Just, Couthon,
Hanriot, and several others, were ordered under arrest.
Hanriot at this crisis again displayed his qualities of action. While
the members of the Convention were wasting time in talk and
self-congratulation, he was getting his forces together. He succeeded
in freeing the accused deputies from their place of temporary arrest,
and by the evening, all were gathered together at the Hotel de Ville.
The Jacobins declared for Robespierre. The party made determined {221}
efforts through the evening to raise insurrection. But only small
bodies of national guards could be kept together at the Hotel de Ville,
and these began to dwindle away rapidly late in the evening when heavy
rain fell.
Meanwhile the Convention had met again in evening session. It
appointed one of its own members, Barras, to command all the military
forces that could be mustered, and then voted the escaped deputies
outlaws for having broken arrest. The western districts of the city
rallied to the Convention. Barras showed energy and courage.
Information reached him of the state of affairs at the Hotel de Ville,
and at one o'clock in the morning of the 29th he rallied several
sectional battalions and marched quickly against the Robespierrists.
At the Hotel de Ville there was little resistance. It was raining
hard, and few remained with the Jacobin leaders. There was a short
scuffle, in which Robespierre apparently attempted to kill himself and
lodged a bullet in his jaw. The arrests were carried out, and a few
hours later, no trial being necessary for outlaws, Robespierre, St.
Just, Hanriot, Couthon and about twenty more, were driven through the
streets to the guillotine.
{222}