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.