THE RISE OF THE JACOBIN PARTY.
The French Revolution can be divided into many periods, and several
parties directed it in turn. But, broadly speaking, besides its minor
phases, it contained two movements, successive and distinct. The
first movement began in 1789, and lost its force in 1791. The second
movement came to the front in 1791, when the earlier one was dying
out; helped by external circumstances, it quickly swept everything
before it; and it carried on the Revolution, by new methods and for
different objects, until 1794. The first movement was chiefly political
in form, and although social questions entered deeply into it and gave
it its irresistible force, still to the end its social aspects were
subordinate. Its leaders were politicians. Its object was the creation
of a new political order. Its attention was fixed upon political
change. The second movement had its political aspects too, and
political issues mingled largely with it. But it sprang primarily from
social causes. Its leaders succeeded because they claimed to be social
reformers. Its favourite objects were the transference of property, the
extinction of poverty and riches, the creation of a new social state.
The one movement of course was inextricably bound up with the other,
and no exact dates marked their beginnings or their ends. But the rise
of the new principles, and their triumph over the old, was the chief
characteristic of the later Revolution, and was the reason why, after
1791, the Revolution went forward and developed afresh.
There is no doubt that in 1791 there were many signs of a pause and a
reaction. The Revolution was clearly victorious. The worst features
of the old system--its despotism, its privilege, its inequality, its
corrupt Court, its antiquated law-courts, its favoured aristocracy
and Church--had been swept away. The widest freedom in politics, in
industry, in discussion, had been established, though it was not
always observed on the popular side. The blight of feudalism and
the intolerable burdens of taxation had disappeared. The majority
of Frenchmen felt that their wishes were satisfied and their aims
attained. Accordingly, the fever and enthusiasm of the earlier days
naturally abated. Men began to long for a period of quiet, after the
stormy triumphs and excitement of the past two years, and to fall back
out of the turmoil of politics into the routine of daily life. Such a
movement was both natural and inevitable, and in 1791 it involved no
serious danger to the cause of progress. The consequence was that the
great mass of citizens gradually withdrew from politics. The numbers
at the polls steadily fell. In 1790 and in 1791, all over the country,
the elections showed an increasing number of absentees. In many places
only a third or a fourth of the electorate voted. In others only a
tenth or a twelfth appeared. In Paris less than one-tenth of the number
of voters continued to take part in the elections, and even that
proportion steadily tended to decline. The duties of voting imposed
by the new Constitution were so cumbrous that they demanded a great
sacrifice of time. Politics had become both laborious and disorderly;
and most men would only consent to the sacrifice and discomfort which
they involved, under the influence of strong excitement. Thus, when
the excitement began to lessen, the part which busy people played in
politics declined, and the control of the elections, and the power
which it carried, fell to those who had no pressing occupations and
whose enthusiasm had not waned.
But while the majority thus passed out of politics, an active and
dissatisfied minority remained. All over France, and especially in
Paris and in the great provincial cities, there were many, in 1791,
to whom the policy of the leaders of the Revolution, and the action
of the great party which ranged itself behind Lafayette and the
Lameths, had caused increasing discontent. To them the Revolution, so
satisfactory to many, had brought only disappointment. Their vague
but ardent anticipations of a new social state seemed as far as ever
from realisation. The leaders of the Assembly were beginning to speak
of the Revolution as accomplished, and yet all over France there were
unmistakable evidences of disorder and distress. It is true that trade
had been largely stimulated by the issue of the Assignats; but the
credit of the Assignats did not last long, and the improvement was
consequently temporary and fictitious. The condition of the labouring
class was still unsettled. The pressure of hunger, in spite of the
abundant harvest of 1790, was still in many places keen.
The middle classes, both in the towns and in the country, had clearly
been great gainers by the Revolution. They had broken down the insolent
ascendency of the class above them. They had secured for themselves
the chief authority in the State. They were enjoying to the full the
sense of their new importance--the sense that from a position of
utter insignificance they had risen to be the actual rulers of the
land. Thus the tradesmen, the lawyers, the prosperous artisans, the
'active citizens' of the towns, proud of their rights and places in
the new Constitution, in the municipalities, in the National Guard,
rejoiced in the success of the Revolution, and only regretted that
it gave them so much to do; while the farmers and proprietors in the
country districts, set free from the yoke of feudalism, shared the
satisfaction of the bourgeois in the towns. But below these classes
came another, which had no such cause for self-congratulation. The
Métayers and smallest land-owners, the holders of an acre or half an
acre of land, the labourers who had no land at all, had gained far less
than their superiors. They had indeed escaped from the cruel burden
of the old taxes, from the personal tyranny of their seigneurs, from
the militia-service, from the necessity of forced labour. But they
looked for more than that. They had not yet seen opened to them any
path towards prosperity. The wealthy neighbours, who added to their
earnings, had been scared or swept away by the Revolution. Wages were
even more difficult to obtain than before. The prospect of living
without hunger seemed to their troubled minds to be as distant and
remote. Men who had no capital could not profit by the sale of the
Church lands. Even some of those who, having a little capital, had
hurried to invest it in the purchase, found too late that the bargain
was a bad one, for the lands had been so much neglected that they
required fresh capital to work them up. The consequence was that,
although the sale of Church lands must in very many cases have been of
advantage to the peasants, yet in some cases the small buyers, who had
expended all their savings in the purchase, were ruined by the rash
investment, and joined the great army of the needy poor.
The causes which led to disquiet in the country were reproduced still
more strongly in the towns. To Paris and the great provincial cities
flocked many of those who could not find subsistence in the country.
There work might be more easily forthcoming. There, at any rate, it was
easier to make their voices heard. But in Paris the same dislocation
of industry prevailed. The National Assembly had abolished the guilds
and the old restrictions upon trade, and had established complete
freedom of labour. But a change so large, however beneficial it might
be--and there were not wanting politicians in Paris, among whose voices
Marat's diatribes rose most shrilly, to criticise the Assembly's
action--could not be accomplished without much confusion. Moreover, the
influx from the provinces tended to make employment scarcer, and the
influence of political excitement did not help towards tranquillity.
The consequence was that the general destitution did not disappear. In
vain the State came forward to appease it by opening public workshops
in Paris. The regular work and the high wages offered, which were
actually equal to the highest day-wages then to be obtained in France,
drew applicants from all quarters, but only increased the difficulties
of the problem. The great towns in the departments followed the
example of the authorities in Paris. Toulouse and Amiens, Besançon and
Lyons, and many other places speedily found that they had thousands
of applicants for work which nobody required to have done, and which
was generally neglected by those who undertook to do it. In Paris the
numbers employed by the municipality rose to twenty and then to thirty
thousand, but still the outlook remained as unsatisfactory as ever, and
the discontent of the poorest classes unallayed.
There were thus, by the summer of 1791, large numbers of people,
both in town and country, who would not tolerate the idea that the
Revolution was over, and who still hoped for a share in the spoils
of freedom. To meet and govern their wishes, to remove the causes of
their trouble, to convert them into fairly contented citizens, was
no easy task. The greatest statesmen might well have failed in the
endeavour, for social perplexities are wont to tax the wisdom of the
most experienced politicians. Unfortunately, the politicians then at
the head of affairs in France were neither experienced nor wise. They
were not alive to the dangers which threatened. They did not attempt
to understand their cause. Satisfied that they had regenerated France,
they did not fully believe in the existence of the grievances put
forward, and they had no notion of what they ought to do to meet them.
The truth is that the dominant party in 1791, the party represented
by Lafayette and Bailly, by Barnave and the Lameths, were in an
impossible position. They were pledged to support the King and the
new Constitution. They were pledged to resist republicanism. Their
instincts led them to sympathise with the idea of a well-ordered
freedom, based on property and on the predominance of the middle-class.
But such a system was difficult to reconcile with the theory which
they preached. For two years past they had been proclaiming the
absolute equality of men, the sovereignty of the whole people, the pure
democracy of Rousseau's dream. For two years past they had been busy
stripping the Crown of its attributes, denouncing its agents, limiting
its power. Thus, when they endeavoured to pause, when they began to
insist upon the necessity of maintaining the monarchical system, when
they plainly showed their intention not to admit the poorest class
to power, that class retorted by echoing the theories which they had
taught them, and by resenting the consequences which they deduced.
Logically, the position of the Constitutional party was untenable, and
to fail in logic was then a crime in France. Morally and materially
their position was untenable too. For their action could not be
reconciled with the dogmas on which they professed that all government
was based.
Accordingly, as the Revolution went forward, the moderate majority
found itself growing unpopular with the poor. The decrees which imposed
a property qualification for all the rights of active citizenship,
for electors and elected alike, were bitterly resented by those whom
they excluded from power, and were clearly inconsistent with the
philosophic formulas to which their authors habitually appealed. The
manner in which the municipal authorities and the National Guards used
the force at their disposal to support the new order and to suppress
all who seemed inclined to resist it, was sometimes irritating and
oppressive. The uncertainty on each occasion whether the party in power
would applaud and sanction a popular outbreak, or would take fright and
endeavour to punish it, deprived their action of its moral weight. The
policy which first abolished the old industrial system to clear the way
for free combination, and which then, in June 1791, taking alarm at
the unions which sprang up among the workmen, interfered to prohibit
all combinations for the future, was not likely to ensure respect. The
policy which first induced the State to seek popularity by an enormous
extension of public workshops, and which then, in the summer of 1791,
frightened at the results of its folly and at the number of strangers
flocking to Paris, drew back and suddenly dissolved the workshops,
and bade the strangers return to their homes, was certain to lead to
distress and disappointment. Had the party in power been consistently
firm, had it shown its determination at all costs to keep order and
never to yield to threatening agitation, it might have been wrong, but
it might have been respected. As it was, it was never strong enough to
be feared. It was only strong enough to become disliked.
Thus, with the large discontented element in France, with the people
who were most miserable and needy, and who were specially numerous in
Paris, there was, in 1791, a growing sense that the Revolution had so
far been a failure, that it had not corresponded to its own promises
or to their passionate hopes, that it had not in any way materially
benefited them, and that a new Revolution was needed, to do for the
poor what the earlier movement had done only for the comparatively
rich. The strength of this feeling it is difficult to estimate, but
there seems no doubt that it was widely spread. With it there went a
deep conviction that the new movement would never come from the party
in power, and that new leaders and principles were wanted to carry the
democratic theory logically out.
It was on these grounds, and supported by this sentiment, that the
Jacobin party rose. The root of the Jacobin theory was that all power
and right resided in the people, and that when the people acted, law
and government must give way before them. The people were sovereign and
could not do wrong. Consequently, it was the business of the people to
watch their rulers very closely, to supervise their conduct jealously,
to remind them that they were only agents and puppets of a sovereign
always suspicious and alert. If the sovereign chose to come forward,
no Ministers or rulers must interfere to thwart it. They must obey,
whatever it might command. Obviously, according to this theory, popular
movements, whatever their character might be, were merely the highest
expression of the law. Even if attended by violence and murder, they
were still the action of the sovereign. Those who obstructed them were
traitors and usurpers. Those who punished them were guilty of a crime.
It is possible to understand how this theory, which is no travesty of
the Jacobin creed, planted deeply in mediocre minds, where the baldest
logic took the place of reason, might lead those who believed in it to
anarchy, while they believed they were on the road to freedom.
Another direct result of the doctrine was the dogmatism and
self-assertion which it bred. The people having become the sovereign,
every man in his own estimation, however ignorant of politics before,
became a responsible ruler too. The Jacobin was filled with a sense
of vast responsibility, puffed up with pride in his new importance.
The Government, the Law, the Church, the public functionaries, had
suddenly become his nominees, and he must personally see that they
did their duty. A curious inflation accordingly appeared in his tone.
His language became that of a dictator. His belief in himself mounted
to an extraordinary level of conceit. The self-confidence which goes
with youth perhaps helped to throw him off his balance, for it is
interesting to notice how largely the doctrine found recruits among the
young. Not only individuals, but public bodies, seemed to catch the
spirit of self-assertion. Even small municipalities began to insist on
acting as independent sovereigns, refused to listen to any superiors,
and placed their own laws above the laws of the Assembly. An extreme
instance was afforded by the little town of Issy l'Evêque, where the
priest, an enterprising politician, acting apparently as leader of the
parish, assumed a brief but magnificent dictatorship, issued a complete
code for the government and administration of the town, imposed
taxes, imprisoned his opponents, seized upon grain, confiscated and
partitioned the land in the neighbourhood, and exercised undisputed the
prerogatives of a sovereign prince. When the people were admittedly
sovereign, it followed, in the view of the enthusiast, that any
proportion of the people could be sovereigns too, and, provided that he
were a patriot, every man might be a law unto himself.
When these deep-rooted ideas showed themselves in action, the results
were inevitably disastrous. The labouring population, possessed
with the belief that supreme power had been transferred to them,
naturally wished to use it, as their superiors had used it in the
past, in order to enrich themselves. A general resistance began to
rent, tithes, taxes, and money-claims of any kind. While abolishing
feudal sovereignty and privilege, the Assembly had endeavoured
to confirm all those rights which the feudal seigneur enjoyed as
contractor and lessor; but this distinction the peasant naturally did
not understand. While abolishing many odious imposts, the State had
of course been compelled to substitute some taxes for them. But the
peasant, who had only grasped the idea that the Revolution was in
some way to set him free from all irksome demands, resented the new
taxes as an encroachment on his rights. In many cases he proceeded
to help himself to any property of the State which came within his
reach. Squatters settled upon the confiscated Church estates. Bodies
of men assembled and cut down the timber upon the public lands. Mobs
stormed the custom-houses and drove out the clerks. Armed associations
prevented the collection of taxes. The idea, originating in minds
easily confused, tended to become a passion, and when it was resisted,
violence was the result.
It was in this way that the Jacobin theory, deduced from philosophy,
welcomed by young enthusiasts, scarcely understood by the mass
of the people, who applauded it because it opened the way to the
satisfaction of their wants, spurred on by opposition, embittered by
panic, suspicion, persecution, and translated into action by physical
distress, gradually took root in the minds of the poor. But it was
by violence that the theory triumphed. It is exceedingly difficult
to form a just impression of the part which force played in politics
in France in the years 1790 and 1791. On the one side, writers pass
over the incidents of disorder. On the other side, they amass them
without analysis or explanation, and thereby produce an impression
which is probably in some measure false. Historians seem on this point
to imagine that facts are a matter of political opinion. There were
undoubtedly, in 1790 and 1791, tranquillising influences at work. The
decisive triumph of the party of reform, the satisfaction ensuing on
the sale of the Church lands and on the issue of the Assignats, the
establishment of the new Constitutional authorities, the activity of
the bourgeois guards, who went so far as to organise combinations
between National Guards in different districts for the common object of
suppressing anarchy, the natural instinct of every nation to secure as
soon as possible the reign of order--all these causes made for peace,
and produced periods of general tranquillity. But still the records
of those years are full of signs of deep-seated confusion, of riots,
murders and acts of pillage, which were perhaps to be expected, but
which cannot be ignored.
The spirit of disorder appeared in many forms. In some cases the
outbreaks were due to fear and hatred of 'aristocrats.' In some they
were a recrudescence of the peasant war against the châteaux. In
some they arose from the conflict between the priesthood of the old
ecclesiastical system and the decrees of the National Assembly, and
these religious controversies, heated by passion and embittered by
ancient rancours, produced, especially at Nîmes and Montauban and over
the whole of the South of France, a terrible agitation almost amounting
to civil war. In some cases they were due to purely local and personal
reasons. In many cases they were caused by the fear of starvation, and
their object was the seizure of grain. In others, especially at Lyons
and Marseilles, they were due to the excessive severity displayed by
the National Guards in maintaining order, and to the bitter conflict
that was beginning between the bourgeois and the labouring population.
Elsewhere, as at Avignon, they originated in a political revolution,
and called to the front the large ruffianly element which, under the
lax rule of the Popes, had for long been allowed to harbour in that
city. In other cases, again, there is little doubt that criminals took
advantage of the disorder of the time to make politics the pretext
for private plunder. All sorts of opportunities for disorder offered,
and in the midst of such vast changes it was inevitable that those
opportunities should be sometimes abused.
The most serious feature of these outbreaks was that, instead of their
becoming rare and abortive as time went on, the tendency of events,
especially after 1791, was in the opposite direction. Their political
influence increased. Instead of the law becoming stronger, and the
disorderly element falling under the ban of the respectable majority,
the law appeared to grow steadily weaker, and the resistance of the
respectable majority declined. The disorderly element organised itself,
won elections, proclaimed its principles, and seated itself in the seat
of power. The National Assembly decided to 'veil the statue of the
law.' Mob-leaders were enthroned as law-givers in the towns where their
violence had made them supreme. Their opponents, royalists, priests or
bourgeois, became their prey, for outrages committed on those who were
unpopular were almost certain to go unpunished. It was not the number
of people killed which made the riots serious. It was the fact that
they could be killed with impunity, the fact that there was no certain
protection against violence for anyone who by creed or opinion or
report was obnoxious to the mob. It was this general insecurity which
brought the Jacobins to the front. For, wherever the law is paralysed,
the most violent are the most powerful, and the French bourgeois,
brave enough in the pursuit of glory, seems to lack moral courage for
resistance, when intimidation and outrage threaten him within his gates.
Another very noticeable point in the history of the Jacobin triumph
is the completeness of the party organisation. It is the first
modern example of what organisation in politics can do. Although the
club-lists afterwards included a great variety of names, the number
of genuine Jacobin politicians, apart from the vague crowds whom they
directed, seems never to have been very large. So far as one can judge
by the polls, the Jacobins in Paris, even at the height of their power,
appear not to have exceeded ten or eleven thousand. Two good judges,
Malouet and Grégoire, who had many opportunities of observation, and
who belonged to totally different parties, agreed later in reckoning
all the Jacobins in the country at about three hundred thousand, and
the highest estimate only gives them one hundred thousand more. The
leaders of the new party belonged chiefly to the middle class. Lawyers
and small professional men, clerks and journalists, men accustomed
to take the lead in practical affairs, ready with tongue or pen,
anxious to make their way in life, with sufficient knowledge to be
self-confident and insufficient knowledge to be wise, played the
largest part among them. From this class came most of the conspicuous
leaders, Danton and Robespierre, Desmoulins and Fréron, Hébert and
Chaumette. A few others were writers and professors, students like St.
Just, actors like Collot d'Herbois, priests like Grégoire, Jean Bon St.
André, Chabot and Lebon, gloomy visionaries like Marat, or foreigners
like the amazing Anacharsis Clootz, who assured the Legislative
Assembly that his heart was French, though his soul was 'sans-culotte.'
Later on the quality deteriorated, and a lower and worse element
enveloped the rest. But the important Jacobin leaders were men of
education, although they often condescended in pursuit of popularity to
adopt worse manners than their own.
It was through their success in organisation that these men attained
to power. From the first the Jacobin Society in Paris, with its many
great names and high prestige, had attained an exceptional position,
and that position it immensely strengthened by establishing branch
societies all over France. In the autumn of 1790, the Club in Paris
founded a newspaper to circulate among its members, and entrusted the
task of editing it to Laclos. Before the end of the year, it was able
to publish a list of over a hundred and twenty provincial clubs, all
affiliated to the Society in Paris, in constant correspondence with
it, taking their views from its leaders and directing their policy
by theirs. To these clubs flocked the energetic young Radicals of
the provincial towns. They became centres of advanced revolutionary
feeling. Their members had faith, enthusiasm, recklessness, ambition;
they organised local politics, suggested or connived at political
riots, and every day claimed a larger part in the direction of
local affairs. In some large cities the authorised Jacobin Club had
an unauthorised club or combination behind it, composed of less
respectable and responsible politicians, who popularised the doctrines
of the superior body, and supplemented them, when necessary, by force.
As the year 1791 advanced, the number of affiliated clubs steadily
increased. In August, it had risen to nearly four hundred. In the
autumn and winter, it rose more rapidly still. In June, 1792, it had
reached twelve hundred; and by the end of August in that year, one
fairly competent observer reckons that there were twenty-six thousand
Jacobin clubs in France. The value of this widespread organisation
in giving to the party strength and cohesion cannot be placed too
high. When it is remembered that this was the only federation in
existence--for all attempts made by other parties to found similar
organisations were broken up by force--it is more easy to realise the
influence which the Jacobins wielded upon politics, and to understand
how the Club in Paris, even when distrusted and unpopular, was able to
face its enemies and to hold its own.
Meanwhile another organisation, destined to give the Jacobins command
of the capital, had been growing up in Paris. The Revolution had
restored to Paris the local freedom of which the monarchy had stripped
her, and one of the first objects of Parisian politicians had been
to establish a municipality in the capital. After the taking of the
Bastille, the informal Assembly of Parisian electors, which, in the
collapse of the old system, had temporarily usurped administrative
power, was replaced by a more regular body, entitled 'The Three
Hundred,' elected by the various districts, and charged with the
task of preparing a permanent constitution for the city. It was this
body--The Three Hundred--which, with Bailly at its head, had governed
Paris during the year that followed, and which by its somewhat
irritating action had earned unpopularity with the poor. But on the
whole, in spite of many mistakes, and in the face of many difficulties,
it did useful and necessary work. However, in the early autumn of 1790,
this body was replaced by a new system which remained the responsible
government of Paris until the reaction after the Terror. Under it,
the city was divided into forty-eight Sections. The Sections elected
a number of representatives, who formed the municipal council, and
some of whom formed the municipal executive[7]. At the head of the
whole organisation was the Mayor, elected by the votes of the citizens
of Paris. The Mayor, as the head of this great organisation, became
an official of the first importance. The National Guard was under his
orders. The resources of the capital were at his command. He and his
council controlled the politics of Paris, and the politics of Paris
governed France. Besides that, each of the forty-eight Sections had
its own elected authority, a permanent committee of sixteen members,
to carry out the orders of the municipal body, invested with some
powers of administration and police. The Jacobins, in accordance with
their theory, argued that all the Sectional Assemblies ought to sit
permanently, that the active citizens ought to meet every day, and
that the municipality ought daily to take their opinions on current
questions. The sovereign people, they declared, could not properly
delegate their authority to representatives. The more practical theory,
however, of representative government carried the day. But the Jacobins
carried a clause which provided that the voters of any Section should
assemble, whenever fifty active citizens in that Section demanded
it, and that all the forty-eight Sections should assemble, if eight
of them simultaneously presented a request. The result was that, in
quarters where Jacobin views prevailed, and especially in the poorer
Sections of Paris, the Sectional Assemblies were constantly meeting,
and urging their opinions on the municipal body. When the majority
in the quieter Sections ceased to take an active part in politics,
the revolutionary Sections were able, by persistent pressure and by
resorting to violence and riot, to manipulate the municipal elections,
to dictate to the municipal body, and ultimately to control that great
organisation and to use its forces for the furtherance of their views.
The death of Mirabeau prepared the way for the accession of the Jacobin
leaders to power. Even before that, Robespierre was a familiar figure
in the Assembly, but during the summer months of 1791, his influence
and importance in it steadily increased. From the first, he had been
the most conspicuous advocate of Rousseau's theory, the most deeply
convinced exponent of the Jacobin belief. His principles were to his
mind absolutely clear. To gain complete equality for men, to protest
in the name of justice against any law which permitted considerations
of circumstance or necessity to interfere with abstract rights, to
establish in the world the reign of sentimental logic, based on the
philosophy of the _Contrat Social_, this was his unwavering creed.
It governed his hopes, his policy, his life. He loved to expound
its principles, to revel in its phrases, to declaim about its fine
desires. He never tired of speaking, and this, in one shape or another,
always was his theme. The Assembly might laugh or chatter, audiences
might come and go, but nothing checked the rhetoric of Robespierre.
His self-complacency was as intense as his faith. He was the chosen
minister of Virtue, to preach its gospel to the regenerated world. That
seems to have been his profound conviction, and that was unquestionably
the foundation of his strength.
There is little doubt that in this respect the man was honest. His
weak sentiment was real. His love of order and of decency was genuine.
His incorruptibility was known and rare. His conceit was phenomenal.
His power of self-deception was unbounded. On the whole, Robespierre
was faithful to his theories. He was capable, as he showed on more
than one occasion, of attacking popular proposals, if they seemed
to him opposed to principle. He did not, it is true, denounce the
lawlessness and outrage which he naturally detested; but his reticence
was probably due, less to the calculations of a subtle policy, than
to his singular faculty of persuading himself, whenever riots or
massacres occurred, that it was only the people executing justice, and
that the justice of the people must be right. Robespierre never took
the lead at critical moments, when decisive action was needed. He was
constitutionally nervous and undecided. He had none of the audacity
which made Danton great. Fearless in sophistry, he was timid in
action. On certain occasions it is very difficult to free him from the
charge of cowardice, and yet it is possible that his hesitation arose
chiefly from the necessity, which he always felt, of reconciling his
action with his theory, before he could act with a clear conscience.
In disguising crime in the panoply of virtue, so satisfactorily as
to deceive himself, Robespierre had no peer. The Jacobin theory set
above the law the action of the sovereign people. That action showed
itself in riots. Those riots involved terrorism and loss of life. If
consequences of that kind followed, they could not be prevented. Only
the depravity of human nature, which rendered them necessary, must
be deplored. Thus Robespierre, the high-priest of the doctrine, was
always the readiest to defend it, to throw over every lawless action
the mask of verbal sentiment and virtue. And thus he became the leader
of his party. His policy was ultimately the most deadly, because its
desperate logic was the outcome of a theory which could do no wrong.
If statesmanship be the compromise of theories with facts, Robespierre
was essentially no statesman, for to his fatal and narrow idealism any
compromise with the realities round him was unknown.
The summer of 1791 is the critical period in the fortunes of the rival
parties. When the majority lost in Mirabeau their strongest leader,
Robespierre, the chief of the new party, came to the front. It is
difficult to resist the conclusion that at this time the future was
still undecided, and the Jacobin triumph by no means secured. Had the
party in power possessed a few men of practical vigour and wisdom, it
seems just possible that the Revolution might have paused, and might
have been guided into the path of ordered freedom. But they had no
organisation. They did not see their danger. They had no experience
to help them, and Mirabeau was dead. The King's unfortunate flight
to Varennes in June, and the manifesto in which he set forth his
grave complaints against the Revolution, played into the hands of the
advanced party. It greatly increased the difficulties of the majority,
who desired to keep Louis on the throne. It was followed by an outbreak
of Jacobin activity, which, however, displayed many varieties of view.
Danton and the Cordeliers, Brissot and Desmoulins boldly demanded the
establishment of a republic, but their opinions were not shared by all
their party. Marat proposed the appointment of a Dictator to put all
his enemies to death. The partisans of the Duke of Orleans declared for
Louis' deposition, with the object of securing the throne for the Duke.
But the declarations of the Jacobin Club were curiously uncertain.
They demanded Louis' deposition, but they hesitated to propose the
abolition of the throne. On the 1st of July, at a session of the Club,
Billaud-Varennes was not allowed even to speak on behalf of a republic.
Some days later, on the evening of the 13th, influenced possibly by the
reaction in the Assembly, Robespierre came forward and declared that he
personally was not a republican, and that 'the word republic did not
signify any particular form of government'; while even Danton avoided
the question and confined himself to attacks upon the inviolability of
the king.
The majority in the Assembly took advantage of the divisions among
their opponents to assert their views. Barnave and the Lameths,
and the party which they directed, rallied to the support of the
new Constitution. In vain the Republicans protested. Deserted by
the Jacobin Club, ill-supported by their leaders, closely watched
by Lafayette, they attempted to keep alive the agitation by a
demonstration, on the 17th July, in the Champ de Mars. The object was
to secure signatures for a monster petition demanding the dethronement
of the king. It does not appear that the objects of the gathering
were sinister or dangerous; but the disorder of the time, the furious
language in which Marat, Desmoulins and other advanced leaders incited
the people to violence, and the difficulties of their own position,
naturally alarmed the Constitutional party. The municipality, taking
its cue from the Assembly, determined to put the demonstration down;
and, owing to blunders which cannot well be explained, but which can
easily be imagined, the result was a fierce and sanguinary disturbance,
ending in serious loss of life. How far Lafayette and Bailly were to
blame for their conduct, or whether it is fair to impute blame to
them at all, will always be matter for discussion. But it is most
instructive to notice the effects which the 'massacre of the Champ
de Mars' produced. It was the one occasion in the history of the
Revolution when the party of order, rightly or wrongly, decisively
asserted themselves, and it shows convincingly how strong they
were, had they realised their strength and known how to use it. For
the moment their triumph was complete. The Republican agitation
collapsed. The leaders who inspired it, but who had kept in the
background, suddenly disappeared from politics. Danton, under threats
of prosecution, retired to the country. Robespierre summarily changed
his lodgings. Marat hid himself and prepared to escape to England.
Desmoulins suspended the issue of his paper. The Constitutional party
opened a new club called the Feuillants, and many of the Jacobins
joined it at once. Of the three hundred deputies who were members of
the Jacobin Club, all but seven retired. And Louis was successfully
re-established on the throne. Had the majority possessed any vigour or
cohesion, they might conceivably have stamped out the Jacobin movement,
and have secured the freedom which they fancied they had won.
Instead of that, they threw away their victory. Barnave, Malouet and
a few other members of the majority did make an attempt to organise
their party, and some idea of an effectual revision of the Constitution
was entertained. But it ended in nothing. The fatal want of union and
of practical ability which characterised the party, their lack of
definiteness and insight, their fondness for glib talk and theory,
frustrated the idea. Slowly but steadily, Robespierre's influence
reasserted itself in the Assembly. The Jacobin leaders returned to
public life, and resumed their tactics unimpeded. The only permanent
results of the 17th July were to widen the breach between the party
in power and the party which was still excluded, and to leave in the
minds of those who had suffered, and in the great mass of the poor who
sympathised with them, abidingly bitter memories of injustice calling
for expiation and revenge.
The reviving influence of the Jacobins was clearly seen in September
and October, 1791. Helped by the blind fatuity of the royalists, they
were able to carry a resolution rendering members of the existing
legislature ineligible for election to the next, and thus driving
their most active opponents, for a time at any rate, out of power.
The revision of the Constitution told slightly against them, but it
came to very little, and all its worst faults were retained. When the
Constituent Assembly separated at the end of September, Robespierre
and Pétion, not Lafayette or Barnave, were its heroes with the
populace of Paris. And in the months which followed, the power of
their party increased. In spite of the motion which the majority of
the Assembly had passed just before its dissolution, forbidding the
affiliation of popular clubs and their interference in the general
election, the Jacobin clubs rapidly multiplied, and threw all their
energies into the electoral contest. The abolition of the property
qualification for deputies had already been secured by the persistence
of Robespierre. The retirement of Lafayette from the chief command
of the National Guard, and the abolition of that post as a permanent
office, considerably weakened the Constitutional party. The growing
sense of weariness with politics, and the desire to rest from agitation
felt by the bulk of the people, began to show itself more distinctly.
The renewal of the whole of the legislature and of one-half of all
the local officials, afforded an opportunity for many moderate
and experienced men to retire, and for more pushing and ambitious
politicians to fill their places. The number of elections, and the
fact that they were held so near together, prevented many voters from
recording their votes. The necessity of taking the oath to observe the
new ecclesiastical system disfranchised a large number of scrupulous
Catholics. The intimidation practised by the Jacobins against all
reactionary voters, of which there are clear examples but the effects
of which it is difficult to estimate, must have kept many quiet people
away. All over France the proportion of voters who came forward to vote
was very small. The result showed, in the new Assembly, a considerable
increase in the advanced party, and many new-comers who hurried at
once to join the Jacobin Club. But it showed also that the majority of
voters loyally adhered to the new Constitution, were fully prepared to
give it a trial, and were well represented even in Paris itself.
Unhappily, however, for France, the majority never found the time
to rally. From the end of 1791, the shadow of war began to darken
the political horizon. At the critical moment, when the nation had
to choose between the majority, which wished to consolidate the new
system, and the minority, which wanted to destroy it for something
else, the alarm of invasion redoubled the panic and disorder, paralysed
any possible reaction, and threw Frenchmen off their balance again.
The war with Europe meant a struggle both for freedom and for national
existence. In the tumult of that struggle all other considerations were
flung to the winds. And the men who could best save the Revolution and
maintain the honour of the country became the heroes and the tyrants of
France.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 7: The 144 representatives of the Sections formed the
General Council of the Commune; 48 of these formed the municipal body;
and 16 of these were the actual Administrators, distributed among
five departments, of 'subsistence,' 'police,' 'finance,' 'public
establishments,' and 'public works.' See Mortimer-Ternaux's _Histoire
de la Terreur_, vol. i. Appendix III, where the whole subject is
thoroughly discussed.]