unfailing lucidity, his power of grasping in a moment the essential
issue of a debate, his skill in hitting blots and throwing the arguments
on his own side into the most vivid and various lights, his marvelous
memory in catching up the scattered threads of a debate, the rare
combination in his speeches of the most glowing vehemence of style with
the closest and most transparent reasoning, and the air of intense
conviction which he threw into every discussion, had never been
surpassed. He was one of the fairest of debaters, and it was said that
the arguments of his opponents were very rarely stated with such
masterly power as by Fox himself before he proceeded to grapple with,
and to overthrow them.
He possessed to the highest degree what Walpole called the power of
“declaiming argument,” and that combination of rapidity and soundness of
judgment which is the first quality of a debater. “Others,” said Sir
George Savile, “may have had more stock, but Fox had more ready money
about him than any of his party.” “I believe,” said Lord Carlisle,
“there never was a person yet created who had the faculty of reasoning
like him.” “Nature,” said Horace Walpole, “had made him the most
wonderful reasoner of the age.” “He possessed beyond all moderns,” wrote
Mackintosh, “that union of reason, simplicity, and vehemence which
formed the prince of orators.” “Had he been bred to the bar,” wrote
Philip Francis, “he would in my judgment have made himself in a shorter
time, and with much less application than any other man, the most
powerful litigant that ever appeared there.” “He rose by slow degrees,”
said Burke, “to be the most brilliant and accomplished debater the world
ever saw.” His finest speeches were wholly unpremeditated, and the
complete subordination in them of all rhetorical and philosophical
ambition to the immediate purpose of the debate has greatly impaired
their permanent value; but, even in the imperfect fragments that remain,
the essential qualities of his eloquence may be plainly seen.
JEAN PAUL MARAT.
BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE.
[A leader of the revolutionary Reign of Terror in France, born in
1744, assassinated by Charlotte Corday in 1793. His energy and
ferocity made him a power, which he never could have become by his
talents. He was the right hand of Robespierre, and the principal
agent in the destruction of the Girondist party in 1793. With
Danton and Robespierre he formed the triumvirate which turned
France into a vast human shambles.]
Three men among the Jacobins--Marat, Danton, and Robespierre--merited
distinction and possessed authority. Owing to a malformation, or
distortion, of head and heart, they fulfilled the requisite conditions.
Of the three, Marat is the most monstrous; he borders on the lunatic, of
which he displays the chief characteristics--furious exaltation,
constant overexcitement, feverish restlessness, an inexhaustible
propensity for scribbling, that mental automatism and tetanus of the
will under the constraint and rule of a fixed idea, and, in addition to
this, the usual physical symptoms, such as sleeplessness, a livid tint,
bad blood, foulness of dress and person, with, during the last five
months of his life, irritations and eruptions over his whole body.
Issuing from incongruous races, born of a mixed blood, and tainted with
serious moral commotions, he harbors within him a singular germ;
physically he is an abortion, morally a pretender, and one who covets
all places of distinction.
His father, who was a physician, intended from his early childhood that
he should be a _savant_; his mother, an idealist, meant that he should
be a philanthropist, while he himself always steered his course toward
both summits. “At five years of age,” he says, “it would have pleased me
to be a schoolmaster, at fifteen a professor, at eighteen an author, and
a creative genius at twenty,” and afterward, up to the last, an apostle
and martyr to humanity. “From my earliest infancy I had an intense love
of fame, which changed its object at various stages of my life, but
which never left me for a moment.” He rambled over Europe or vegetated
in Paris for thirty years, living a nomadic life in subordinate
positions; hissed as an author, distrusted as a man of science, and
ignored as a philosopher; a third rate political writer, aspiring to
every sort of celebrity and to every honor, constantly presenting
himself as a candidate and as constantly rejected--too great a
disproportion between his faculties and ambition.
Talentless, possessing no critical acumen, and of mediocre intelligence,
he was fitted only to teach some branch of the sciences, or to practice
some one of the arts, either as professor or doctor, more or less bold
and lucky, or to follow, with occasional slips on one side or the other,
some path clearly marked out for him. Never did man with such
diversified culture possess such an incurably perverted intellect. Never
did man, after so many abortive speculations and such repeated
malpractices, conceive and maintain so high an opinion of himself. Each
of these two sources in him augments the other; through his faculty of
not seeing things as they are, he attributes to himself virtue and
genius; satisfied that he possesses genius and virtue, he regards his
misdeeds as merits and his crotchets as truths.
Thenceforth, and spontaneously, his malady runs its own course and
becomes complex; next to the ambitious delirium comes the _mania for
persecution_. In effect, the evident or demonstrated truths which he
supplies should strike the public at once; if they burn slowly or miss
fire, it is owing to their being stamped out by enemies or the envious;
manifestly, they have conspired against him, and against him plots have
never ceased. First came the philosophers’ plot; when his treatise on
“Man” reached Paris from Amsterdam, “they felt the blow I struck at
their principles and had the book stopped at the custom-house.” Next
came the plot of the doctors, who “ruefully estimated my enormous gains.
Were it necessary, I could prove that they often met together to
consider the best way to destroy my reputation.” Finally, came the plot
of the academicians; “the disgraceful persecution I had to undergo from
the Academy of Sciences for two years, after being satisfied that my
discoveries on light upset all that it had done for a century, and that
I was quite indifferent about becoming a member of its body.... Would it
be believed that these scientific charlatans succeeded in underrating
my discoveries throughout Europe, in exciting every society of _savants_
against me, and in closing against me all the newspapers!” Naturally,
the would-be-persecuted man defends himself--that is to say, he attacks.
Naturally, as he is the aggressor, he is repulsed and put down, and,
after creating imaginary enemies, he creates real ones, especially in
politics, where, on principle, he daily preaches insurrection and
murder.
Naturally, in fine, he is prosecuted, convicted at the Chatelet Court,
tracked by the police, obliged to fly and wander from one hiding-place
to another; to live like a bat “in a cellar, underground, in a dark
dungeon”; once, says his friend Panis, he passed “six weeks on one of
his buttocks,” like a madman in his cell, face to face with his
reveries. It is not surprising that, with such a system, the reverie
should become more intense, more and more gloomy, and at last settle
down into a _confirmed nightmare_; that, in his distorted brain, objects
should appear distorted; that, even in full daylight, men and things
should seem awry, as in a magnifying, dislocating mirror; that
frequently, on the numbers (of his journal) appearing too blood-thirsty,
and his chronic disease too acute, his physician should bleed him to
arrest these attacks and prevent their return. When a madman sees
everywhere around him--on the floors, on the walls, on the
ceiling--toads, scorpions, spiders, swarms of crawling, loathsome
vermin, he thinks only of crushing them, and the disease enters on its
last stage; after the ambitious delirium, the mania for persecution, and
the settled nightmare, comes the homicidal mania. At the outset a few
lives would have sufficed: “Five hundred heads ought to have fallen when
the Bastile was taken, and all would then have gone on well.” But,
through lack of foresight and timidity, the evil was allowed to spread,
and the more it spread the larger the amputation should have been. With
the sure, keen eye of the surgeon, Marat gives its dimensions; he has
made his calculation beforehand. In September, 1792, in the Council at
the Commune, he estimates approximatively forty thousand as the number
of heads that should be laid low. Six weeks later, the social abscess
having enormously increased, the figures swell in proportion; he now
demands two hundred and seventy thousand heads, always on the score of
humanity, “to insure public tranquillity,” on condition that the
operation be intrusted to him, as the summary, temporary justiciary.
Save this last point the rest is granted to him; it is unfortunate that
he could not see with his own eyes the complete fulfillment of his
programme, the batches condemned by the revolutionary tribunal, the
massacres of Lyons and Toulon, the drownings of Nantes. From first to
last he was in the right line of the revolution; lucid on account of his
blindness, thanks to his crazy logic, thanks to the concordance of his
personal malady with the public malady, to the precocity of his complete
madness alongside of the incomplete or tardy madness of the rest, he
alone steadfast, remorseless, triumphant, perched aloft, at the first
bound, on the sharp pinnacle, which his rivals dared not climb, or only
stumbled up.
PRINCE TALLEYRAND.
BY ARCHIBALD ALISON.
[Charles Maurice Prince de Talleyrand-Perigord, one of the most
distinguished of modern French statesmen and diplomatists, born in
1754, died in 1838. Originally a churchman, he became Bishop of
Autun in 1788, though notorious for loose and licentious living.
During the period of the revolution Talleyrand was in England and
America. He returned to France in 1797, and under the Directory was
called to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. He was of great
assistance to Napoleon in accomplishing his _coup d’état_, and
thenceforward was the French ruler’s trusted adviser in all matters
of state till 1807, when a coldness grew on Napoleon’s part.
Talleyrand’s bitter and pungent criticisms on Napoleon’s policy so
enraged the emperor that he finally deprived him of his lucrative
offices. In 1812 he foretold the coming downfall of Napoleon, and
the accomplishment of the prediction achieved for him the
admiration of Europe. While the allies were advancing on Paris in
1814, Talleyrand was in secret communication with them. After the
restoration of the Bourbons, Talleyrand took but little part in
public affairs till 1830, when, as ambassador to England, he
negotiated an important treaty settling the status of the peninsula
kingdoms of Spain and Portugal.]
Never was character more opposite to that of the Russian autocrat than
that of his great coadjutor in the pacification and settlement of
Europe, Prince Talleyrand. This most remarkable man was born at Paris in
1754, so that in 1814 he was already sixty years of age. He was
descended of an old family, and had for his maternal aunt the celebrated
Princess of Ursius, who played so important a part in the war of the
succession at the court of Philippe V.[29] Being destined for the
Church, he early entered the seminary of St. Sulpice, and even there was
remarkable for the delicate vein of sarcasm, nice discrimination, and
keen penetration, for which he afterward became so distinguished in
life. At the age of twenty-six he was appointed agent-general for the
clergy, and in that capacity his administrative talents were so
remarkable that they procured for him the situation of Bishop of Autun,
which he held in 1789, when the revolution broke out. So remarkable had
his talents become at this period that Mirabeau, in his secret
correspondence with Berlin, pointed him out as one of the most eminent
men of the age.
He was elected representative of the clergy of his diocese for the
Constitute Assembly, and was one of the first of that rank in the Church
who voted on the 29th of May for the junction of the ecclesiastical body
with the _Tiers État_. He also took the lead in all the measures, then
so popular, which had for their object to spoliate the Church, and apply
its possessions to the service of the state; accordingly, he himself
proposed the suppression of tithes and the application of the property
of the Church to the public treasury. In all these measures he was deaf
to the remonstrances of the clergy whom he represented, and already he
had severed all the cords which bound him to the Church.
His ruling principle was not any peculiar enmity to religion, but a
fixed determination to adhere to the dominant party, whatever it was,
whether in Church or state; to watch closely the signs of the times, and
throw in his lot with that section of the community which appeared
likely to gain the superiority. In February, 1790, he was appointed
President of the Assembly, and from that time forward, down to its
dissolution, he took a leading part in all its measures. He was not,
however, an orator; knowledge of men and prophetic sagacity were his
great qualifications. Generally silent in the hall of debate, he soon
gained the lead in the council of deliberation or committee of
management. He officiated as constitutional bishop to the great scandal
of the more orthodox clergy in the great _fête_ on the 14th of July,
1790, in the Champ de Mars; but he had already become fearful of the
excesses of the popular party, and was, perhaps, the only person to whom
Mirabeau on his deathbed communicated his secret views and designs for
the restoration of the French monarchy.
Early in 1792 he set out on a secret mission to London, where he
remained till the breaking out of the war in February, 1793, and enjoyed
much of the confidence of Mr. Pitt. He naturally enough became an object
of jealousy to both parties, being denounced by the Jacobins as an
emissary of the court, and by the Royalists as an agent of the Jacobins;
and, in consequence, he was accused and condemned in his absence, and
only escaped by withdrawing to America, where he remained till 1795
engaged in commercial pursuits. It was not the least proof of his
address and sagacity that he thus avoided equally the crimes and the
dangers of the Reign of Terror, and returned to Paris at the close of
that year with his head on his shoulders, and without deadly hostility
to any party in his heart.
His influence and abilities soon caused themselves to be felt; the
sentence of death, which had been recorded against him in his absence,
was soon recalled; he became a leading member of the Club of Salm, which
in 1797 was established to counterbalance the efforts of the Royalists
in the Club of Clichy; and on the triumph of the revolutionists by the
violence of Augereau in July, 1797, he was appointed Minister of Foreign
Affairs. Nevertheless, aware of the imbecility of the directorial
government, he entered warmly into the views of Napoleon, upon his
return from Egypt, for its overthrow. He was again made Minister of
Foreign Affairs by that youthful conqueror after the 18th Brumaire, and
continued, with some few interruptions, to be the soul of all foreign
negotiations and the chief director of foreign policy, down to the
measures directed against Spain in 1807. On that occasion, however, his
wonted sagacity did not desert him; he openly disapproved of the attack
on the peninsula, and was, in consequence, dismissed from office, which
he did not again hold till he was appointed chief of the provisional
government on the 1st of April, 1814. He had thus the singular address,
though a leading character under both _régimes_, to extricate himself
both from the crimes of the revolution and the misfortunes of the
Empire.
He was no ordinary man who could accomplish so great a prodigy and yet
retain such influence as to step, as it were, by common consent into the
principal direction of affairs on the overthrow of Napoleon. His power
of doing so depended not merely on his great talents; they alone, if
unaccompanied by other qualifications, would inevitably have brought him
to the guillotine under the first government or the prisons of state
under the last. It was his extraordinary versatility and flexibility of
disposition, and the readiness with which he accommodated himself to
every change of government and dynasty which he thought likely to be
permanent, that mainly contributed to this extraordinary result. Such
was his address that, though the most changeable character in the whole
revolution, he contrived never to lose either influence or reputation by
all his tergiversations; but, on the contrary, went on constantly rising
to the close of his career, when above eighty years of age, in weight,
fortune, and consideration.
The very fact of his having survived, both in person and influence, so
many changes of government, which had proved fatal to almost all his
contemporaries, of itself constituted a colossal reputation; and when he
said, with a sarcastic smile, on taking the oath of fidelity to Louis
Philippe in 1830, “_C’est le treisiéme_,” the expression, repeated from
one end of Europe to the other, produced a greater admiration for his
address than indignation at his perfidy.
He has been well described as the person in existence who had the least
hand in producing, and the greatest power of profiting, by revolutions.
He was not destitute of original thought, but wholly without the
generous feeling, the self-forgetfulness, which prompt the great in
character as well as talent to bring forth their conceptions in word or
action, at whatever hazard to themselves or their fortunes. His object
always was not to direct, but to observe and guide the current; he never
opposed it when he saw it was irresistible, nor braved its dangers where
it threatened to be perilous, but quietly withdrew until an opportunity
occurred, by the destruction alike of its supporters and its opponents,
to obtain its direction. In this respect his talents very closely
resembled those of Metternich, of whom a character has already been
drawn; but he was less consistent than the wary Austrian diplomatist,
and, though equaled by him in dissimulation, he was far his superior in
perfidy.
It cost him nothing to contradict and violate his oaths whenever it
suited his interest to do so, and the extraordinary and almost unbroken
success of his career affords, as well as that of Napoleon, the most
striking confirmation of the profound saying of Johnson--that no man
ever raised himself from private life to the supreme direction of
affairs, in whom great abilities were not combined with certain
meannesses, which would have proved altogether fatal to him in ordinary
life.
Yet was he without any of the great vices of the revolution; his
selfishness was constant, his cupidity unbounded, his hands often
sullied by gold, but he was not cruel or unforgiving in his disposition,
and few, if any, deeds of blood stain his memory. His witticisms and
_bon mots_ were admirable, and repeated from one end of Europe to the
other; yet was his reputation in this respect, perhaps, greater than the
reality, for, by common consent, every good saying at Paris during his
life-time was ascribed to the ex-Bishop of Autun. But none perhaps more
clearly reveals his character and explains his success in life than the
celebrated one, “That the principal object of language is to conceal the
thought.”
GEORGE JACQUES DANTON.
BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE.
[A principal leader in French revolutionary times, born 1759,
executed 1794. He was one of the first to advocate violent
measures, organized the attack on the Tuileries in 1792, and was
principally instrumental in bringing on the dreadful September
massacres of the same year, when all those confined in the Paris
prisons were slaughtered. On being elected to the convention, he
was foremost in forcing on the trial of the king, and afterward, as
a member of the Committee of Public Safety, in breaking the power
of the Girondists, though he would have spared their lives. He
incurred the hate of Robespierre by those inclinations to mercy and
moderation which would have put an end to the Reign of Terror, and
was sent to the scaffold by the plots of his cunning and implacable
adversary.]
Between the demagogue and the highwayman the resemblance is close; both
are leaders of bands, and each requires an opportunity to organize his
band. Danton, to organize his band, required the revolution. “Of low
birth, without a patron,” penniless, every office being filled, and “the
Paris bar unattainable,” admitted a lawyer after “a struggle,” he for a
long time strolled about the streets without a brief, or frequented the
coffee-houses, the same as similar men nowadays frequent the beer-shops.
At the Café de l’École, the proprietor, a good-natured old fellow “in a
small round perruque, gray coat, and a napkin on his arm,” circulated
among his tables smiling blandly, while his daughter sat in the rear as
cashier. Danton chatted with her, and demanded her hand in marriage. To
obtain her he had to mend his ways, purchase an attorneyship in the
Court of the Royal Council, and find bondsmen and indorsers in his small
native town.
Wedded and lodged in the gloomy Passage du Commerce, “more burdened with
debts than with causes,” tied down to a sedentary profession which
demands vigorous application, accuracy, a moderate tone, a respectable
style, and blameless deportment; obliged to keep house on so small a
scale that, without the help of a _louis_ regularly advanced to him each
week by his coffee-house father-in-law, he could not make both ends
meet; his free-and-easy tastes, his alternately impetuous and indolent
disposition, his love of enjoyment and of having his own way, his rude,
violent instincts, his expansiveness, creativeness, and activity, all
rebel; he is ill-calculated for the quiet routine of our civil careers;
it is not the steady discipline of an old society that suits him, but
the tumultuous brutality of a society going to pieces, or one in a state
of formation. In temperament and character he is a _barbarian_, and a
barbarian born to command his fellow-creatures, like this or that vassal
of the sixth century or baron of the tenth century.
A colossus with the head of a “Tartar,” pitted with the small-pox,
tragically and terribly ugly, with a mask convulsed like that of a
growling “bull-dog,” with small, cavernous, restless eyes buried under
the huge wrinkles of a threatening brow, with a thundering voice, and
moving and acting like a combatant, full-blooded, boiling over with
passion and energy, his strength in its outbursts seeming illimitable,
like the forces of Nature, roaring like a bull when speaking, and heard
through closed windows fifty yards off in the street, employing
immoderate imagery, intensely in earnest, trembling with indignation,
revenge, and patriotic sentiments, able to arouse savage instincts in
the most tranquil breast and generous instincts in the most brutal,
profane, using emphatic terms, cynical, not monotonously so, and
affectedly like Hébert, but spontaneously and to the point, full of
crude jests worthy of Rabelais, possessing a stock of jovial sensuality
and good-humor, cordial and familiar in his ways, frank, friendly in
tone; in short, outwardly and inwardly the best-fitted for winning the
confidence and sympathy of a Gallic-Parisian populace, and all
contributing to the formation of “his inborn, practical popularity,” and
to make of him “a grand seignior of _sans-culotterie_.”