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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.