the moment the theatre is ready, whether this be a mean one, got up for
the occasion, and the actors rogues, scamps, and prostitutes, or the
part an ignoble one, murderous, and finally fatal to him who undertakes
it. He comprehended from the first the ultimate object and definite
result of the revolution, that is to say, the dictatorship of the
violent minority. Immediately after the “14th of July,” 1789, he
organized in his quarter of the city a small independent republic,
aggressive and predominant, the center of the faction, a refuge for the
riff-raff and a rendezvous for fanatics, a pandemonium composed of every
available madcap, every rogue, visionary, shoulder-hitter, newspaper
scribbler, and stump-speaker, either a secret or avowed plotter of
murder, Camille Desmoulins, Fréron, Hébert, Chaumette, Clootz,
Théroigne, Marat--while, in this more than Jacobin state, the model in
anticipation of that he is to establish later, he reigns, as he will
afterward reign, the permanent president of the district, commander of
the battalion, orator of the club, and the concocter of bold
undertakings. In order to set the machine up, he cleared the ground,
fused the metal, hammered out the principal pieces, filed off the
blisterings, designed the action, adjusted the minor wheels, set it
a-going and indicated what it had to do, and, at the same time, he
forged the plating which guarded it from the foreigner and against all
outward violence. The machine being his, why, after constructing it, did
he not serve as its engineer?
Because, if competent to construct it, he was not qualified to manage
it. In a crisis he may take hold of the wheel himself, excite an
assembly or a mob in his favor, carry things with a high hand, and
direct an executive committee for a few weeks. But he dislikes regular,
persistent labor; he is not made for studying documents, for poring over
papers, and confining himself to administrative routine. Never, like
Robespierre and Billaud, can he attend to both official and police
duties at the same time, carefully reading minute daily reports,
annotating mortuary lists, extemporizing ornate abstractions, coolly
enunciating falsehoods, and acting out the patient, satisfied
inquisitor; and, especially, he can never become the systematic
executioner.
On the one hand, his eyes are not obscured by the gray veil of theory;
he does not regard men through the “Contrat-Social” as a sum of
arithmetical units, but as they really are, living, suffering, shedding
their blood, especially those he knows, each with his peculiar
physiognomy and demeanor. Compassion is excited by all this when one has
any feeling, and he had. Danton had a heart; he had the quick
sensibilities of a man of flesh and blood stirred by the primitive
instincts, the good ones along with the bad ones, instincts which
culture had neither impaired nor deadened, which allowed him to plan and
permit the September massacre, but which did not allow him to practice,
daily and blindly, systematic and wholesale murder. Already in
September, “cloaking his pity under his bellowing,” he had shielded or
saved many eminent men from the butchers. When the ax is about to fall
on the Girondists, he is “ill with grief” and despair. “I am unable to
save them,” he exclaimed, “and big tears streamed down his cheeks.”
On the other hand, his eyes are not covered by the bandage of incapacity
or lack of forethought. He detected the innate vice of the system, the
inevitable and approaching suicide of the revolution. “The Girondists
forced us to throw ourselves upon the _sans-culotterie_ which has
devoured them, which will devour us, and which will eat itself up.” “Let
Robespierre and Saint-Just alone, and there will soon be nothing left in
France but a Thebaid of political Trappists.” At the end he sees more
clearly still. “On a day like this I organized the revolutionary
tribunal.... I ask pardon for it of God and man.... In revolutions,
authority remains with the greatest scoundrels.... It is better to be a
poor fisherman than govern men.”
Nevertheless, he professed to govern them; he constructed a new machine
for the purpose, and, deaf to its creaking, it worked in conformity with
its structure and the impulse he gave to it. It towers before him, this
sinister machine, with its vast wheel and iron cogs grinding all France,
their multiplied teeth pressing out each individual life, its steel
blade constantly rising and falling, and, as it plays faster and faster,
daily exacting a larger and larger supply of human material, while those
who furnish this supply are held to be as insensible and as senseless as
itself. Danton can not, or will not, be so. He gets out of the way,
diverts himself, gambles, forgets; he supposes that the titular
decapitators will probably consent to take no notice of him; in any
case, they do not pursue him; “they would not dare do it.... No one must
lay hands on me; I am the ark.” At the worst he prefers “to be
guillotined rather than guillotine.” Having said or thought this, he is
ripe for the scaffold.
ROBESPIERRE.
BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE.
[Maximilian Marie Isadore de Robespierre, the most powerful figure
among the French revolutionists, born 1758, guillotined 1794. By
profession an attorney, he was elected to the Constituent Assembly,
the States General, in 1789, from Arras. Profoundly imbued with the
theories of Rousseau, he was from the beginning a fierce assailant
of the monarchy, and after Mirabeau’s death rapidly acquired a
commanding position in public affairs. In the National Convention,
which succeeded the dissolution of the States General and the
abdication and imprisonment of Louis XVI, Robespierre was a
prominent leader, and identified himself with the extreme party,
the Jacobins, called the “Mountain,” from the elevated seats on
which they sat. During this earlier part of his political career he
affected opposition to capital punishment, and remonstrated with
Danton against the September massacres. He led the Jacobins,
however, in demanding the trial and death of the king, and proposed
the decree organizing the Committee of Public Safety, which was
clothed with omnipotent sway. When he became a member of this
terrible body he speedily instituted what is known as “the Reign of
Terror,” beginning with the destruction of the Girondists, against
whom he formulated the deadly epigram: “There are periods in
revolutions when to live is a crime.” Danton was sacrificed to his
envy and fears as a dangerous rival. Robespierre’s overthrow, after
about a year of practical dictatorship, was owing to two causes,
which inspired the wavering courage of his opponents in the
convention. The mistress of Tallien, a prominent revolutionist, lay
in prison expecting a daily call to the guillotine. Carnot (the
grandfather of the present chief of the French republic) attended a
dinner-party at which Robespierre was present. The heat of the day
had caused the guests to throw off their coats, and Carnot in
looking for a paper took Robespierre’s coat by mistake, in the
pocket of which he saw the memorandum containing the names of those
prescribed for the guillotine, among them his own and those of
other guests. On the 9th Thermidor, July 27, 1794, occurred the
outbreak in the convention which broke Roberspierre’s power, and on
the following day sent him to the guillotine, thus ending the Reign
of Terror.]
Marat and Danton finally become effaced, or efface themselves, and the
stage is left to Robespierre who absorbs attention. If we would
comprehend him we must look at him as he stands in the midst of his
surroundings. At the last stage of an intellectual vegetation passing
away, he remains on the last branch of the eighteenth century, the most
abortive and driest offshoot of the classical spirit. He has retained
nothing of a worn-out system of philosophy but its lifeless dregs and
well-conned formulæ, the formulæ of Rousseau, Mably, and Raynal,
concerning “the people, nature, reason, liberty, tyrants, factions,
virtue, morality,” a ready-made vocabulary, expressions too ample, the
meaning of which, ill-defined by the masters, evaporates in the hands of
the disciple. He never tries to get at this; his writings and speeches
are merely long strings of vague abstract periods; there is no telling
fact in them, no distinct, characteristic detail, no appeal to the eye
evoking a living image, no personal, special observation, no clear,
frank, original impression.
It might be said of him that he never saw anything with his own eyes,
that he neither could nor would see, that false conceptions have
intervened and fixed themselves between him and the object; he combines
these in logical sequence, and simulates the absent thought by an
affected jargon, and this is all. The other Jacobins alongside of him
likewise use the same scholastic jargon; but none of them expatiate on
it so lengthily. For hours, we grope after him in the vague shadows of
political speculation, in the cold and perplexing mist of didactic
generalities, trying in vain to make something out of his colorless
tirades, and we grasp nothing. We then, astonished, ask what all this
talk amounts to, and why he talks at all; the answer is, that he has
said nothing and that he talks only for the sake of talking, the same as
a sectary preaching to his congregation, neither the preacher nor his
audience ever wearying, the one of turning the dogmatic crank, and the
other of listening. So much the better if the hopper is empty; the
emptier it is the easier and faster the crank turns. And better still,
if the empty term he selects is used in a contrary sense; the sonorous
words justice, humanity, mean to him piles of human heads, the same as a
text from the gospels means to a grand inquisitor the burning of
heretics.
Now, his first passion, his principal passion, is literary vanity. Never
was the chief of a party, sect, or government, even at critical moments,
such an incurable, insignificant rhetorician, so formal, so pompous, and
so vapid. On the eve of the 9th of Thermidor, when it was necessary to
conquer or die, he enters the tribune with a set speech, written and
rewritten, polished and repolished, overloaded with studied ornaments
and bits for effect, coated by dint of time and labor, with the academic
varnish, the glitter of symmetrical antitheses, rounded periods,
exclamations, preteritions, apostrophes, and other tricks of the pen.
There is no sign of true inspiration in his elaborate eloquence, nothing
but recipes, and those of a worn-out art--Greek and Roman commonplaces,
Socrates and the hemlock, Brutus and his dagger, classic metaphors like
“the flambeaux of discord,” and “the vessel of state,” words coupled
together and beauties of style which a pupil in rhetoric aims at on the
college bench; sometimes a grand bravura air, so essential for parade in
public; oftentimes a delicate strain of the flute, for, in those days,
one must have a tender heart; in short, Marmontel’s method in
“Belisarius,” or that of Thomas in his “Eloges,” all borrowed from
Rousseau, but of inferior quality, like a sharp, thin voice strained to
imitate a rich, powerful voice; a sort of involuntary parody, and the
more repulsive because a word ends in a blow, because a sentimental,
declamatory Trissotin poses as statesman, because the studied elegances
of the closet become pistol shots aimed at living breasts, because an
epithet skillfully directed sends a man to the guillotine.
Robespierre, unlike Danton, has no cravings. He is sober; he is not
tormented by his senses; if he gives way to them, it is only no further
than he can help, and with a bad grace; in the Rue Saintonge in Paris,
“for seven months,” says his secretary, “I knew of but one woman that he
kept company with, and he did not treat her very well.... Very often he
would not let her enter his room”; when busy, he must not be disturbed;
he is naturally steady, hard-working, studious and fond of seclusion, at
college a model pupil, at home in his province an attentive advocate, a
punctual deputy in the Assembly, everywhere free of temptation and
incapable of going astray. “Irreproachable” is the word which, from
early youth, an inward voice constantly repeats to him in low tones to
console him for obscurity and patience. Thus has he ever been, is now,
and ever will be; he says this to himself, tells others so, and on this
foundation, all of a piece, he builds up his character. He is not, like
Desmoulins, to be seduced by dinners; like Barnave, by flattery; like
Mirabeau and Danton, by money; like the Girondists, by the insinuating
charm of ancient politeness and select society; like the Dantonists, by
the bait of joviality and unbounded license--he is the incorruptible.
“Alone, or nearly alone, I do not allow myself to be corrupted; alone,
or nearly alone, I do not compromise the right; which two merits I
possess in the highest degree. A few others may live correctly, but they
oppose or betray principles; a few others profess to have principles,
but they do not live correctly. No one else leads so pure a life or is
so loyal to principles; no one else joins to so fervent a worship of
truth so strict a practice of virtue; I am the unique.” What can be more
agreeable than this mute soliloquy? It is gently heard the first day in
Robespierre’s address to the Third Estate of Arras; it is uttered aloud
the last day in his great speech in the convention; during the interval,
it crops out and shines through all his compositions, harangues, or
reports, in exordiums, parentheses, and perorations, permeating every
sentence like the drone of a bagpipe. In three years a chorus of a
thousand voices, which he formed and led indefatigably, rehearses to him
in unison his own litany, his most sacred creed, the hymn of three
stanzas composed by him in his own honor, and which he daily recites to
himself in a low tone of voice, and often in a loud one: “Robespierre
alone has discovered the ideal citizen! Robespierre alone attains to it
without exaggeration or shortcomings! Robespierre alone is worthy of and
able to lead the revolution!” Cool infatuation carried thus far is
equivalent to a raging fever, and Robespierre almost attains to the
ideas and the ravings of Marat.
First, in his own eyes, he, like Marat, is a persecuted man, and, like
Marat, he poses himself as a “martyr,” but more skillfully and keeping
within bounds, affecting the resigned and tender air of an innocent
victim, who, offering himself as a sacrifice, ascends to heaven,
bequeathing to mankind the imperishable souvenir of his virtues. “I
excite against me the self-love of everybody; I sharpen against me a
thousand daggers. I am a sacrifice to every species of hatred.... To the
enemies of my country, to whom my existence seems an obstacle to their
heinous plots, I am ready to sacrifice it, if their odious empire is to
endure; ... let their road to the scaffold be the pathway of crime, ours
shall be that of virtue; ... let the hemlock be got ready for me, I
await it on this hallowed spot. I shall at least bequeath to my country
an example of constant affection for it, and to the enemies of humanity
the disgrace of my death.”
Naturally, as always with Marat, he sees around him only “evil-doers,”
“intriguers,” and “traitors.” Naturally, as with Marat, common sense
with him is perverted, and, like Marat again, he thinks at random. “I am
not obliged to reflect,” said he to Garat, “I always rely on first
impressions.” “For him,” says the same authority, “the best reasons are
suspicions,” and nought makes headway against suspicions, not even the
most positive evidence.
Such assurance, equal to that of Marat, is terrible and worse in its
effect, for Robespierre’s list of conspirators is longer than that of
Marat. Political and social, in Marat’s mind, the list comprehends only
aristocrats and the rich; theological and moral in Robespierre’s mind,
it comprehends all atheists and dishonest persons--that is to say,
nearly the whole of his party. In this narrow mind, given up to
abstractions and habitually classifying men under two opposite headings,
whoever is not with him on the good side is against him on the bad side,
and, on the bad side, the common understanding between the factious of
every flag and the rogues of every degree is natural. Add all this
vermin to that which Marat seeks to crush out; it is no longer by
hundreds of thousands, but by millions, exclaim Baudot, Jean Bon St.
André, and Guffroy, that the guilty must be counted and heads laid low!
And all these heads, Robespierre, according to his maxims, must strike
off. He is well aware of this; hostile as his intellect may be to
precise ideas, he, when alone in his closet, face to face with himself,
sees clearly, as clearly as Marat. Marat’s chimera, on first spreading
out its wings, bore its frenzied rider swiftly onward to the charnel
house; that of Robespierre, fluttering and hobbling along, reaches the
goal in its turn; in its turn, it demands something to feed on, and the
rhetorician, the professor of principles, begins to calculate the
voracity of the monstrous brute on which he is mounted. Slower than the
other, this one is still more ravenous, for, with similar claws and
teeth, it has a vaster appetite. At the end of three years Robespierre
has overtaken Marat, at the extreme point reached by Marat at the
outset, and the theorist adopts the policy, the aim, the means, the
work, and almost the vocabulary of the maniac; armed dictatorship of the
urban mob, systematic maddening of the subsidized populace, war against
the bourgeoisie, extermination of the rich, proscription of opposition
writers, administrators, and deputies.
Both monsters demand the same food; only, Robespierre adds “vicious men”
to the ration of his monster, by way of extra and preferable game.
Henceforth, he may in vain abstain from action, take refuge in his
rhetoric, stop his chaste ears, and raise his hypocritical eyes to
heaven, he can not avoid seeing or hearing under his immaculate feet the
streaming gore, and the bones crashing in the open jaws of the
insatiable monster which he has fashioned and on which he prances.
Destructive instincts, long repressed by civilization, thus devoted to
butchery, become aroused. His feline physiognomy, at first “that of a
domestic cat, restless but mild, changes into the savage mien of the
wild-cat, and next to the ferocious mien of the tiger. In the
Constituent Assembly he speaks with a whine, in the convention he froths
at the mouth.” The monotonous drone of a stiff sub-professor changes
into the personal accent of furious passion; he hisses and grinds his
teeth; sometimes, on a change of scene, he affects to shed tears. But
his wildest outbursts are less alarming than his affected sensibility.
The festering grudges, corrosive envies, and bitter schemings which have
accumulated in his breast are astonishing. The gall vessels are full,
and the extravasated gall overflows on the dead. He never tires of
re-executing his guillotined adversaries, the Girondists, Chaumette,
Hébert, and especially Danton, probably because Danton was the active
agent in the revolution of which he was simply the incapable pedagogue;
he vents his posthumous hatred on this still warm corpse in artful
insinuations and obvious misrepresentations. Thus, inwardly corroded by
the venom it distills, his physical machine gets out of order, like that
of Marat, but with other symptoms. When speaking in the tribune “his
hands crisp with a sort of nervous contraction”; sudden tremors agitate
“his shoulders and neck, shaking him convulsively to and fro.” “His
bilious complexion becomes livid,” his eyelids quiver under his
spectacles, and how he looks! “Ah,” said a _Montagnard_, “you would have
voted as we did on the 9th of Thermidor, had you seen his green
eyeballs!” “Physically as well as morally,” he becomes a second Marat,
suffering all the more because his delirium is not steady, and because
his policy, being a moral one, forces him to exterminate on a grander
scale.
But he is a discreet Marat, of a timid temperament, anxious, keeping his
thoughts to himself, made for a schoolmaster or a pleader, but not for
taking the lead or for governing, always acting hesitatingly, and
ambitious to be rather the Pope, than the dictator of the revolution. He
would prefer to remain a political Grandison; he keeps the mask on to
the very last, not only to the public and to others, but to himself and
in his inmost conscience. The mask, indeed, has adhered to his skin; he
can no longer distinguish one from the other; never did impostor more
carefully conceal intentions and acts under sophisms, and persuade
himself that the mask was his face, and that in telling a lie, he told
the truth.
When nature and history combine to produce a character they succeed
better than even man’s imagination. Neither Moliere in his “Tartuffe,”
nor Shakespeare in his “Richard III,” dared bring on the stage a
hypocrite believing himself sincere, and a Cain that regarded himself as
an Abel.
WILLIAM PITT THE YOUNGER.
BY JOHN RICHARD GREEN.
[Son of the Earl of Chatham, born 1759, died 1806, and hardly less
distinguished than his father as a statesman and orator. He became
prime minister at the age of twenty-five, and showed a genius as
parliamentary leader which has never been surpassed and rarely
equaled, retaining him in power in spite of his feebleness in the
conduct of war and diplomacy. His great talents found their most
congenial field in the management of home affairs, being the
prototype of Mr. Gladstone in this respect. It is the younger
Pitt’s glory that with no able man in his own party to support him,
he held power so long unshaken by the incessant assaults of such
men as Burke, Fox, Sheridan, and Lord North.]
When Parliament came together after the overthrow of the Coalition, the
minister of twenty-five was master of England as no minister had been
before. Even the king yielded to his sway, partly through gratitude for
the triumph he had won for him over the Whigs, partly from a sense of
the madness which was soon to strike him down, but still more from a
gradual discovery that the triumph which he had won over his political
rivals had been won, not to the profit of the crown, but of the nation
at large. The Whigs, it was true, were broken, unpopular, and without a
policy, while the Tories clung to the minister who had “saved the king.”
But it was the support of a new political power that really gave his
strength to the young minister. The sudden rise of English industry was
pushing the manufacturer to the front; and all that the trading classes
loved in Chatham, his nobleness of temper, his consciousness of power,
his patriotism, his sympathy with a wider world than the world within
the Parliament house, they saw in his son. He had little indeed of the
poetic and imaginative side of Chatham’s genius, of his quick perception
of what was just and what was possible, his far-reaching conceptions of
national policy, his outlook into the future of the world.