coldness of manner, and by some menacing phrases about the faction of
the so-called Moderates. Danton had gone, as he often did, to his native
village of Arcis-sur-Aube, to seek repose and a little clearness of
sight in the night that wrapped him about. He was devoid of personal
ambition; he never had any humour for mere factious struggles. His,
again, was the temperament of violent force, and in such types the
reaction is always tremendous. The indomitable activity of the last
twenty months had bred weariness of spirit. The nemesis of a career of
strenuous Will in large natures is apt to be a sudden sense of the irony
of things. In Danton, as with Byron it happened afterwards, the
vehemence of the revolutionary spirit was touched by this desolating
irony. His friends tried to rouse him. It is not clear that he could
have done anything. The balance of force, after the suppression of the
Hébertists, was irretrievably against him, as calculation had already
revealed to Robespierre.
There are various stories of the pair having met at dinner almost on the
eve of Danton's arrest, and parting with sombre disquietude on both
sides. The interview, with its champagne, its interlocutors, its play of
sinister repartee, may possibly have taken place, but the alleged
details are plainly apocryphal. After all, 'Religion ist in der Thiere
Trieb,' says Wallenstein; 'the very savage drinks not with the victim,
into whose breast he means to plunge a sword.' Danton was warned that
Robespierre was plotting his arrest. 'If I thought he had the bare
idea,' said Danton with something of Gargantuan hyperbole, 'I would eat
his bowels out.' Such was the disdain with which the 'giant of the
mighty bone and bold emprise' thought of our meagre-hearted pedant. The
truth is that in the stormy and distracted times of politics, and
perhaps in all times, contempt is a dangerous luxury. A man may be a
very poor creature, and still have a faculty for mischief. And
Robespierre had this faculty in the case of Danton. With singular
baseness, he handed over to Saint Just a collection of notes, to serve
as material for the indictment which Saint Just was to present to the
Convention. They comprised everything that suspicion could interpret
malignantly, from the most conspicuous acts of Danton's public life,
down to the casual freedom of private discourse.
Another infamy was to follow. After the arrest, and on the proceedings
to obtain the assent of the Convention to the trial of Danton and others
of its members, one only of their friends had the courage to rise and
demand that they should be heard at the bar. Robespierre burst out in
cold rage; he asked whether they had undergone so many heroic
sacrifices, counting among them these acts of 'painful severity,' only
to fall under the yoke of a band of domineering intriguers; and he cried
out impatiently that they would brook no claim of privilege, and suffer
no rotten idol. The word was felicitously chosen, for the Convention
dreaded to have its independence suspected, and it dreaded this all the
more because at this time its independence did not really exist. The
vote against Danton was unanimous, and the fact that it was so is the
deepest stain on the fame of this assembly. On the afternoon of the
Sixteenth Germinal (April 5, 1794) Paris in amazement and some
stupefaction saw the once-dreaded Titan of the Mountain fast bound in
the tumbril, and faring towards the sharp-clanging knife. 'I leave it
all in a frightful welter,' Danton is reported to have said. 'Not a man
of them has an idea of government. Robespierre will follow me; he is
dragged down by me. Ah, better be a poor fisherman than meddle with the
governing of men!'
* * * * *
Let us pause for a moment over a calmer reminiscence. This was the very
day on which the virtuous and high-minded Condorcet quitted the friendly
roof that for nine months had concealed him from the search of
proscription. The same week he was found dead in his prison. While
Danton was storming with impotent thunder before the tribunal, Condorcet
was writing those closing words of his Sketch of Human Progress, which
are always so full of strength and edification. 'How this picture of the
human race freed from all its fetters,--withdrawn from the empire of
chance, as from that of the enemies of progress, and walking with firm
and assured step in the way of truth, of virtue, and happiness, presents
to the philosopher a sight that consoles him for the errors, the crimes,
the injustice, with which the earth is yet stained, and of which he is
not seldom the victim! It is in the contemplation of this picture that
he receives the reward of his efforts for the progress of reason, for
the defence of liberty. He ventures to link them with the eternal chain
of the destinies of man: it is there he finds the true recompense of
virtue, the pleasure of having done a lasting good; fate can no longer
undo it, by any disastrous compensation that shall restore prejudice and
bondage. This contemplation is for him a refuge, into which the
recollection of his persecutors can never follow him; in which, living
in thought with man reinstated in the rights and the dignity of his
nature, he forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed, by base fear,
by envy: it is here that he truly abides with his fellows, in an elysium
that his reason has known how to create for itself, and that his love
for humanity adorns with all purest delights.'
* * * * *
In following the turns of the drama which was to end in the tragedy of
Thermidor, we perceive that after the fall of the anarchists and the
death of Danton, the relations between Robespierre and the Committees
underwent a change. He, who had hitherto been on the side of government,
became in turn an agency of opposition. He did this in the interest of
ultimate stability, but the difference between the new position and the
old is that he now distinctly associated the idea of a stable republic
with the ascendency of his own religious conceptions. How far the
ascendency of his own personality was involved, we have no means of
judging. The vulgar accusation against him is that he now deliberately
aimed at a dictatorship, and began to plot with that end in view. It is
always the most difficult thing in the world to draw a line between mere
arrogant egoism on the one hand, and on the other the identification of
a man's personal elevation with the success of his public cause. The two
ends probably become mixed in his mind, and if the cause be a good one,
it is the height of pharisaical folly to quarrel with him, because he
desires that his authority and renown shall receive some of the lustre
of a far-shining triumph. What we complain of in Napoleon Bonaparte, for
instance, is not that he sought power, but that he sought it in the
interests of a coarse, brutal, and essentially unmeaning personal
ambition. And so of Robespierre. We need not discuss the charge that he
sought to make himself master. The important thing is that his mastery
could have served no great end for France; that it would have been like
himself, poor, barren, and hopelessly mediocre. And this would have been
seen on every side. France had important military tasks to perform
before her independence was assured. Robespierre hated war, and was
jealous of every victory. France was in urgent need of stable
government, of new laws, of ordered institutions. Robespierre never said
a word to indicate that he had a single positive idea in his head on any
of these great departments. And, more than this, he was incapable of
making use of men who were more happily endowed than himself. He had
never mastered that excellent observation of De Retz, that of all the
qualities of a good party chief, none is so indispensable as being able
to suppress on many occasions, and to hide on all, even legitimate
suspicions. He was corroded by suspicion, and this paralyses able
servants. Finally, Robespierre had no imperial quality of soul, but only
that very sorry imitation of it, a lively irritability.
The base of Robespierre's schemes of social reconstruction now came
clearly into view; and what a base! An official Supreme Being, and a
regulated Terror. The one was to fill up the spiritual void, and the
other to satisfy all the exigencies of temporal things. It is to the
credit of Robespierre's perspicacity that he should have recognised the
human craving for religion, but this credit is as naught when we
contemplate the jejune thing that passed for religion in his dim and
narrow understanding. Rousseau had brought a new soul into the
eighteenth century by the Savoyard Vicar's Profession of Faith, the most
fervid and exalted expression of emotional deism that religious
literature contains; vague, irrational, incoherent, cloudy; but the
clouds are suffused with glowing gold. When we turn from that to the
political version of it in Robespierre's discourse on the relations of
religious and moral ideas with republican principles, we feel as one who
revisits a landscape that had been made glorious to him by a summer sky
and fresh liquid winds from the gates of the evening sun, only to find
it dead under a gray heaven and harsh blasts from the northeast.
Robespierre's words on the Supreme Being are never a brimming stream of
deep feeling; they are a literary concoction: never the self-forgetting
expansion of the religious soul, but only the composite of the
rhetorician. He thought he had a passion for religion; what he took for
religion was little more than mental decorum. We do not mean that he was
insincere, or that he was without a feeling for high things. But here,
as in all else, his aspiration was far beyond his faculty; he yearned
for great spiritual emotions, as he had yearned for great thoughts and
great achievements, but his spiritual capacity was as scanty and obscure
as his intelligence. And where unkind Nature thus unequally yokes lofty
objects in a man with a short mental reach, she stamps him with the very
definition of mediocrity.
How can we speak with decent patience of a man who seriously thought
that he should conciliate the conservative and theological elements of
the society at his feet, by such an odious opera-piece as the Feast of
the Supreme Being? This was designed as a triumphant ripost to the Feast
of Reason, which Chaumette and his friends had celebrated in the winter.
The energumens of the Goddess of Reason had now been some weeks in
their bloody graves; by this time, if they had given the wrong answer to
the supreme enigma, their eyes would perhaps be opened. Robespierre
persuaded the Convention to decree an official recognition of the
Supreme Being, and to attend a commemorative festival in honour of their
mystic patron. He contrived to be chosen president for the decade in
which the festival would fall. When the day came (20th Prairial, June 8,
1794), he clothed himself with more than even his usual care. As he
looked out from the windows of the Tuileries upon the jubilant crowd in
the gardens, he was intoxicated with enthusiasm. 'O Nature,' he cried,
'how sublime thy power, how full of delight! How tyrants must grow pale
at the idea of such a festival as this!' In pontifical pride he walked
at the head of the procession, with flowers and wheat-ears in his hand,
to the sound of chants and symphonies and choruses of maidens. On the
first of the great basins in the gardens, David, the artist, had devised
an allegorical structure for which an inauspicious doom was prepared.
Atheism, a statue of life size, was throned in the midst of an amiable
group of human Vices, with Madness by her side, and Wisdom menacing them
with lofty wrath. Great are the perils of symbolism. Robespierre applied
a torch to Atheism, but alas, the wind was hostile, or else Atheism and
Madness were damp. They obstinately resisted the torch, and it was
hapless Wisdom who took fire. Her face, all blackened by smoke, grinned
a hideous ghastly grin at her sturdy rivals. The miscarriage of the
allegory was an evil omen, and men probably thought how much better the
churchmen always managed their conjurings and the art of spectacle.
There was a great car drawn by milk-white oxen; in the front were ranged
sheaves of golden grain, while at the back shepherds and shepherdesses
posed with scenic graces. The whole mummery was pagan. It was a bringing
back of Cerealia and Thesmophoria to earth. It stands as the most
disgusting and contemptible anachronism in history.
The famous republican Calendar, with its Prairials and Germinals, its
Ventoses and Pluvioses, was an anachronism of the same kind, though it
was less despicable in its manifestation. Its philosophic base was just
as retrograde and out of season as the fooleries of the Feast of the
Supreme Being. The association of worship and sacredness with the fruits
of the earth, with the forces of nature, with the power and variety of
the elements, could only be sincere so long as men really thought of all
these things as animated each by a special will of its own. Such an
association became mere charlatanry, when knowledge once passed into the
positive stage. How could men go back to adore an outer world, after
they had found out the secret that it is a mere huge group of phenomena,
following fixed courses, and not obeying spontaneous and unaccountable
volitions of their own? And what could be more puerile than the fanciful
connection of the Supreme Being with a pastoral simplicity of life? This
simplicity was gone, irrecoverably gone, with the passage from nomad
times to the complexities of a modern society. To typify, therefore, the
Supreme Being as specially interested in shocks of grain and in
shepherds and shepherdesses was to make him a mere figure in an idyll,
the ornament of a rural mask, a god of the garden, instead of the
sovereign director of the universal forces, and stern master of the
destinies of men. Chaumette's commemoration of the Divinity of Reason
was a sensible performance, compared with Robespierre's farcical
repartee. It was something, as Comte has said, to select for worship
man's most individual attribute. If they could not contemplate society
as a whole, it was at least a gain to pay homage to that faculty in the
human rulers of the world, which had brought the forces of nature--its
pluviosity, nivosity, germinality, and vendemiarity--under the yoke for
the service of men.
If the philosophy of Robespierre's pageant was so retrograde and false,
its politics were still more inane. It is a monument of presumptuous
infatuation that any one should feel so strongly as he did that order
could only be restored on condition of coming to terms with religious
use and prejudice, and then that he should dream that his Supreme
Being--a mere didactic phrase, the deity of a poet's georgic--should
adequately replace that eternal marvel of construction, by means of
which the great churchmen had wrought dogma and liturgy and priest and
holy office into every hour and every mood of men's lives. There is no
binding principle of human association in a creed with this one bald
article. 'In truth,' as I have said elsewhere of such deism as
Robespierre's, 'one can scarcely call it a creed. It is mainly a name
for a particular mood of fine spiritual exaltation; the expression of a
state of indefinite aspiration and supreme feeling for lofty things. Are
you going to convert the new barbarians of our western world with this
fair word of emptiness? Will you sweeten the lives of suffering men, and
take its heaviness from that droning piteous chronicle of wrong and
cruelty and despair, which everlastingly saddens the compassionating ear
like moaning of a midnight sea; will you animate the stout of heart with
new fire, and the firm of hand with fresh joy of battle, by the thought
of a being without intelligible attributes, a mere abstract creation of
metaphysic, whose mercy is not as our mercy, nor his justice as our
justice, nor his fatherhood as the fatherhood of men? It was not by a
cold, a cheerless, a radically depraving conception such as this, that
the church became the refuge of humanity in the dark times of old, but
by the representation, to men sitting in bondage and confusion, of
godlike natures moving among them, under figure of the most eternally
touching of human relations,--a tender mother ever interceding for them,
and an elder brother laying down his life that their burdens might be
loosened.'
* * * * *
On the day of the Feast of the Supreme Being, the guillotine was
concealed in the folds of rich hangings. It was the Twentieth of
Prairial. Two days later Couthon proposed to the Convention the
memorable Law of the Twenty-second Prairial. Robespierre was the
draftsman, and the text of it still remains in his own writing. This
monstrous law is simply the complete abrogation of all law. Of all laws
ever passed in the world it is the most nakedly iniquitous. Tyrants have
often substituted their own will for the ordered procedure of a
tribunal, but no tyrant before ever went through the atrocious farce of
deliberately making a tribunal the organised negation of security for
justice. Couthon laid its theoretic base in a fallacy that must always
be full of seduction to shallow persons in authority: 'He who would
subordinate the public safety to the inventions of jurisconsults, to the
formulas of the Court, is either an imbecile or a scoundrel.' As if
public safety could mean anything but the safety of the public. The
author of the Law of Prairial had forgotten the minatory word of the
sage to whom he had gone on a pilgrimage in the days of his youth. 'All
becomes legitimate and even virtuous,' Helvétius had written, 'on behalf
of the public safety.' Rousseau inscribed on the margin, 'The public
safety is nothing, unless individuals enjoy security.' What security was
possible under the Law of Prairial?
After the probity and good judgment of the tribunal, the two cardinal
guarantees in state trials are accurate definition, and proof. The
offence must be capable of precise description, and the proof against
an offender must conform to strict rule. The Law of Prairial violently
infringed all three of these essential conditions of judicial equity.
First, the number of the jury who had power to convict was reduced.
Second, treason was made to consist in such vague and infinitely elastic
kinds of action as inspiring discouragement, misleading opinion,
depraving manners, corrupting patriots, abusing the principles of the
Revolution by perfidious applications. Third, proof was to lie in the
conscience of the jury; there was an end of preliminary inquiry, of
witnesses in defence, and of counsel for the accused. Any kind of
testimony was evidence, whether material or moral, verbal or written, if
it was of a kind 'likely to gain the assent of a man of reasonable
mind.'
Now what was Robespierre's motive in devising this infernal instrument?
The theory that he loved judicial murder for its own sake, can only be
held by the silliest of royalist or clerical partisans. It is like the
theory of the vulgar kind of Protestantism, that Mary Tudor or Philip of
Spain had a keen delight in shedding blood. Robespierre, like Mary and
like Philip, would have been as well pleased if all the world would have
come round to his mind without the destruction of a single life. The
true inquisitor is a creature of policy, not a man of blood by taste.
What, then, was the policy that inspired the Law of Prairial? To us the
answer seems clear. We know what was the general aim in Robespierre's
mind at this point in the history of the Revolution. His brother
Augustin was then the representative of the Convention with the army of
Italy, and General Bonaparte was on terms of close intimacy with him.
Bonaparte said long afterwards, when he was expiating a life of iniquity
on the rock of Saint Helena, that he saw long letters from Maximilian to
Augustin Robespierre, all blaming the Conventional Commissioners--Tallien,
Fouché, Barras, Collot, and the rest--for the horrors they perpetrated,
and accusing them of ruining the Revolution by their atrocities. Again,
there is abundant testimony that Robespierre did his best to induce the
Committee of Public Safety to bring those odious malefactors to justice.
The text of the Law itself discloses the same object. The vague phrases of
depraving manners and applying revolutionary principles perfidiously, were
exactly calculated to smite the band of violent men whose conduct was to
Robespierre the scandal of the Revolution. And there was a curious clause
in the law as originally presented, which deprived the Convention of the
right of preventing measures against its own members. Robespierre's general
design in short was to effect a further purgation of the Convention. There
is no reason to suppose that he deliberately aimed at any more general
extermination. On the other hand, it is incredible that, as some have
maintained, he should merely have had in view the equalisation of rich and
poor before the tribunals, by withdrawing the aid of counsel and testimony
to civic character from both rich and poor alike.
If Robespierre's design was what we believe it to have been, the result
was a ghastly failure. The Committee of Public Safety would not consent
to apply his law against the men for whom he had specially designed it.
The frightful weapon which he had forged was seized by the Committee of
General Security, and Paris was plunged into the fearful days of the
Great Terror. The number of persons put to death by the Revolutionary
Tribunal before the Law of Prairial had been comparatively moderate.
From the creation of the tribunal in April 1793, down to the execution
of the Hébertists in March 1794, the number of persons condemned to
death was 505. From the death of the Hébertists down to the death of
Robespierre, the number of the condemned was 2158. One half of the
entire number of victims, namely, 1356, were guillotined after the Law
of Prairial. No deadlier instrument was ever invented by the cruelty of
man. Innocent women no less than innocent men, poor no less than rich,
those in whom life was almost spent, no less than those in whom its
pulse was strongest, virtuous no less than vicious, were sent off in
woe-stricken batches all those summer days. A man was informed against;
he was seized in his bed at five in the morning; at seven he was taken
to the Conciergerie; at nine he received information of the charge
against him; at ten he went into the dock; by two in the afternoon he
was condemned; by four his head lay in the executioner's basket.