prolonged for many hours always at length exasperates onlookers with
something of the brute ferocity of the actors. The physical strain stirs
the tiger in the blood; they conceive a cruel hatred against weakness,
just as the heated throng of a Roman amphitheatre turned up their thumbs
for the instant despatch of the unfortunate swordsman who had been too
ready to lower his arms. The Right, the Plain, even the galleries,
despised the man who had succumbed. If Robespierre had possessed the
physical strength of Mirabeau or Danton, the Ninth Thermidor would have
been another of his victories. He was crushed by the relentless ferocity
and endurance of his antagonists. A decree for his arrest was resolved
upon by acclamation. He cast a glance at the galleries, as marvelling
that they should remain passive in face of an outrage on his person.
They were mute. The ushers advanced with hesitation to do their duty,
and not without trembling carried him away, along with Couthon and
Saint Just. The brother, for whom he had made honourable sacrifices in
days that seemed to be divided from the present by an abyss of
centuries, insisted with fine heroism on sharing his fate, and Augustin
Robespierre and Le Bas were led off to the prisons along with their
leader and idol.
It was now a little after four o'clock. The Convention, with the
self-possession that so often amazes us in its proceedings, went on with
formal business for another hour. At five they broke up. For life, as
the poets tell, is a daily stage-play; men declaim their high heroic
parts, then doff the buskin or the sock, wash away the paint from their
cheeks, and gravely sit down to meat. The Conventionals, as they ate
their dinners, were unconscious, apparently, that the great crisis of
the drama was still to come. The next twelve hours were to witness the
climax. Robespierre had been crushed by the Convention; it remained to
be seen whether the Convention would not now be crushed by the Commune
of Paris.
Robespierre was first conducted to the prisons of the Luxembourg. The
gaoler, on some plea of informality, refused to receive him. The
terrible prisoner was next taken to the Mairie, where he remained among
joyful friends from eight in the evening until eleven. Meanwhile the old
insurrectionary methods of the nights of June and of August in '92, of
May and of June in '93, were again followed. The beating of the _rappel_
and the _générale_ was heard in all the sections; the tocsin sounded its
dreadful note, reminding all who should hear it that insurrection is
the most sacred and the most indispensable of duties. Hanriot, the
commandant of the forces, had been arrested in the evening, but he was
speedily released by the agents of the Commune. The Council issued
manifestoes and decrees from the Common Hall every moment. The barriers
were closed. Cannon were posted opposite the doors of the hall of the
Convention. The quays were thronged. Emissaries sped to and fro between
the Jacobin Club and the Common Hall, and between these two centres and
each of the forty-eight sections. It is one of the inscrutable mysteries
of this delirious night, that Hanriot did not at once use the force at
his command to break up the Convention. There is no obvious reason why
he should not have done so. The members of the Convention had
re-assembled after their dinner, towards seven o'clock. The hall which
had resounded with the shrieks and yells of the furious gladiators of
the factions all day, now lent a lugubrious echo to gloomy reports which
one member after another delivered from the shadow of the tribune.
Towards nine o'clock the members of the two dread Committees came in
panic to seek shelter among their colleagues, 'as dejected in their
peril,' says an eyewitness, 'as they had been cruel and insolent in the
hour of their supremacy.' When they heard that Hanriot had been
released, and that guns were at their door, all gave themselves up for
lost and made ready for death. News came that Robespierre had broken his
arrest and gone to the Common Hall. Robespierre, after urgent and
repeated solicitations, had been at length persuaded about an hour
before midnight to leave the Mairie and join his partisans of the
Commune. This was an act of revolt against the Convention, for the
Mairie was a legal place of detention, and so long as he was there, he
was within the law. The Convention with heroic intrepidity declared both
Hanriot and Robespierre beyond the pale of the law. This prompt measure
was its salvation. Twelve members were instantly named to carry the
decree to all the sections. With the scarf of office round their waists,
and a sabre in hand, they sallied forth. Mounting horses, and escorted
by attendants with flaring torches, they scoured Paris, calling all good
citizens to the succour of the Convention, haranguing crowds at the
street corners with power and authority, and striking the imaginations
of men. At midnight heavy rain began to fall.
The leaders of the Commune meanwhile, in full confidence that victory
was sure, contented themselves with incessant issue of paper decrees, to
each of which the Convention replied by a counter-decree. Those who have
studied the situation most minutely, are of opinion that even so late as
one o'clock in the morning, the Commune might have made a successful
defence, although it had lost the opportunity, which it had certainly
possessed up to ten o'clock, of destroying the Convention. But on this
occasion the genius of insurrection slumbered. And there was a genuine
division of opinion in the eastern quarters of Paris, the result of a
grim distrust of the man who had helped to slay Hébert and Chaumette. At
a word this distrust began to declare itself. The opinion of the
sections became more and more distracted. One armed group cried, _Down
with the Convention!_ Another armed group cried, _The Convention for
ever, and down with the Commune!_ The two great faubourgs were all
astir, and three battalions were ready to march. Emissaries from the
Convention actually succeeded in persuading them--such the dementia of
the night--that Robespierre was a royalist agent, and that the Commune
were about to deliver the little Lewis from his prison in the Temple.
One body of communist partisans after another was detached from its
allegiance. The deluge of rain emptied the Place de Grève, and when
companies came up from the sections in obedience to orders from Hanriot
and the Commune, the silence made them suspect a trap, and they withdrew
towards the great metropolitan church or elsewhere.
Barras, whom the Convention had charged with its military defence,
gathered together some six thousand men. With the right instinct of a
man who had studied the history of Paris since the July of 1789, he
foresaw the advantage of being the first to make the attack. He arranged
his forces into two divisions. One of them marched along the quays to
take the Common Hall in front; the other along the Rue Saint Honoré to
take it in flank. Inside the Common Hall the staircases and corridors
were alive with bustling messengers, and those mysterious busybodies who
are always found lingering without a purpose on the skirts of great
historic scenes. Robespierre and the other chiefs were in a small room,
preparing manifestoes and signing decrees. They were curiously unaware
of the movements of the Convention. An aggressive attack by the party of
authority upon the party of insurrection was unknown in the tradition of
revolt. They had an easy assurance that at daybreak their forces would
be prepared once more to tramp along the familiar road westwards. It was
now half-past two. Robespierre had just signed the first two letters of
his name to a document before him, when he was startled by cries and
uproar in the Place below. In a few instants he lay stretched on the
ground, his jaw shattered by a pistol-shot. His brother had either
fallen or had leaped out of the window. Couthon was hurled over a
staircase, and lay for dead. Saint Just was a prisoner.
Whether Robespierre was shot by an officer of the Conventional force, or
attempted to blow out his own brains, we shall never know, any more than
we shall ever be quite assured how Rousseau, his spiritual master, came
to an end. The wounded man was carried, a ghastly sight, first to the
Committee of Public Safety, and then to the Conciergerie, where he lay
in silent stupefaction through the heat of the summer day. As he was an
outlaw, the only legal preliminary before execution was to identify
him. At five in the afternoon, he was raised into the cart Couthon and
the younger Robespierre lay, confused wrecks of men, at the bottom of
it. Hanriot and Saint Just, bruised, begrimed, and foul, completed the
band. One who walks from the Palace of Justice, over the bridge, along
the Rue Saint Honoré, into the Rue Royale, and so to the Luxor column,
retraces the _via dolorosa_ of the Revolution on the afternoon of the
Tenth of Thermidor.
* * * * *
The end of the intricate manoeuvres known as the Revolution of
Thermidor was the recovery of authority by the Convention. The
insurrections, known as the days of the Twelfth Germinal, First
Prairial, and Thirteenth Vendémiaire, all ended in the victory of the
Convention over the revolutionary forces of Paris. The Committees, on
the other hand, had beaten Robespierre, but they had ruined themselves.
Very gradually the movement towards order, which had begun in the mind
of Danton, and had gone on in the cloudy purposes of Robespierre, became
definite. But it was in the interest of very different ideas from those
of either Danton or of Robespierre. A White Terror succeeded the Red
Terror. Not at once, however; it was not until nine months after the
death of Robespierre, that the reaction was strong enough to smite his
colleagues of the two Committees. The surviving Girondins had come back
to their seats in the Convention: the Dantonians had not forgiven the
execution of their chief. These two parties were bent on vengeance. In
April, 1795, a decree was passed banishing Billaud de Varennes, Collot
d'Herbois, and Barère. In the following month the leaders of the
Committee of General Security were thrown into prison. The revolution
had passed into new currents. We cannot see any reasons for thinking
that those currents would have led to any happier results if Robespierre
had won the battle. Tallien, Fouché, Barras, and the rest may have been
thoroughly bad men. But then what qualities had Robespierre for building
up a state? He had neither strength of practical character, nor firm
breadth of political judgment, nor a sound social doctrine. When we
compare him,--I do not say with Frederick of Prussia, with Jefferson,
with Washington,--but with the group of able men who made the closing
year of the Convention honourable and of good service to France, we have
a measure of Robespierre's profound and pitiable incompetence.
End of Project Gutenberg's Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3), by John Morley