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.'