THE JACOBINS IN POWER.
The first step taken by the Jacobins, after the defeat of their
opponents in the Convention, to conciliate public opinion in France,
was the proclamation of a new constitution. The 'Constitution of
'93,' which was destined never to come into force, was prepared
under the guidance of Hérault de Séchelles, and was hurried through
the Convention in the course of two or three weeks. More than any
other of the revolutionary constitutions, it was conceived in the
spirit of Rousseau, and embodied the Jacobin belief. In it the
passion for electoral devices, the suspicious dread of executive
power, the desire to refer every question to the immediate judgment
of the people, already familiar to the Jacobin ideal, found their
most positive expression. All rights, abstract and concrete, all
arrangements, legislative and executive, administrative and judicial,
military and financial, were restated and recast. All rulers, even
the executive council of state, were to be nominated by popular
election. All officials were limited to a very brief period of power.
The qualification for the exercise of the suffrage was made as simple
and as slight as possible, but by a somewhat curious exception to the
theory of direct popular control, the system of double election in the
case of most administrative officers was retained. Further, the powers
both of the Executive and of the legislature were jealously guarded by
a series of provisions, which gave the nation a veto on all important
measures, by directing that every question of moment should be
submitted to the assembled people. Never did any Parliament labour with
more misplaced ingenuity to reduce its governors to impotence and to
make their task impossible. 'The law,' declared the new constitution,
'must protect public and private liberties against the oppression of
those who govern. When the Government violates the people's rights,
insurrection is for the people, and for each portion of the people, the
most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.'
It is instructive to notice what followed. No doubt, the new
constitution was partly a tactical device invented to conciliate
opinion. But it also genuinely set forth the doctrine which the
Jacobins as followers of Rousseau held. It is one thing, however, to
cherish a theory, and quite another thing to carry it out. At the
moment when the Jacobins were proposing their extremely democratic
system, which would have made a strong Government impossible, they
found themselves confronted with a situation in which a strong
Government was imperatively required. At the moment when they were
proposing to the French people to annihilate all executive authority,
they found themselves compelled to establish a despotic Executive, if
they wished to save France and to preserve themselves. The conflict
between Jacobin theory and the stern necessity of actual fact, could
not have been better pointed. Forced to choose between the two, the
Jacobins cast their theory to the winds, and the men who had for years
been preaching that the rights of the governed were everything and the
rights of the governors nothing, set to work to found a system, in
which the governors claimed a power never paralleled before, and in
which the governed could not establish even their right to live. The
constitution passed the Convention before the end of June. In the next
few weeks, by dint of great pressure, and in the face of the usual
apathy among the voters, its ratification by the primary assemblies
was secured. It seems that many voters voted for it, hoping that its
adoption would necessitate a general election, and thus end the faction
fights in Paris, and oust the Jacobins from power. The delegates of
the primary assemblies were then convoked to Paris, and induced by
careful management to ask that the dissolution of the Convention should
be postponed till the end of the war. The Convention accepted the
invitation of the patriots. The delegates returned full of enthusiasm
to their homes, to rouse all Frenchmen to serve for the Republic.
The democratic constitution was suspended, and the despotism of the
Committee of Public Safety began.
Nominally, the Convention was still the chief authority in the State.
But after the summer of 1793, it abdicated most of its powers. Its
committees still did a great deal of work. The influence of certain
members, of Cambon on questions of finance, and of Dubois-Crancé on
questions of military organisation, was always very considerable. The
great scheme of public education, which the Convention established on
a generous scale, is a worthy monument of its labours. Its efforts to
provide for the relief of the poor, to promote technical instruction,
to develop science and art, to improve agriculture, to spread the
knowledge of the French language, to found the telegraph system in
France, to inaugurate the decimal system, and to establish uniformity
of weights and measures, bear witness to the activity of the advanced
party. Its bold attempt to reduce to order the chaos of French laws
laid the foundations of the Civil Code. These points ought not to be
forgotten in judging of the work of the Convention, for they show
that there were zealous and useful reformers in its ranks. But still
it must be admitted that the majority of members succumbed to the
Terror as time went on. As far as possible they abstained from voting
or from expressing any opinions at all. Their one endeavour was to
escape notice, and to give a cordial acquiescence to any conditions
which their masters imposed. Sieyès, once the busiest leader of the
Assembly and inexhaustibly fertile in debate, lived by remaining
obstinately mute. When an enemy denounced him at the Jacobin Club,
his shoemaker saved his life by protesting that Sieyès never meddled
with politics and did nothing but read his books. In the same way all
other competitors for power were crushed. The administrative officials
were rigorously sifted, and were deprived of political influence and
of their more important functions. Municipal elections were suspended.
The public service was filled with Sansculottes, and an immense number
of new places were created for the supporters of the victorious party.
The existing authorities having been thus reduced, the Revolutionary
Government was organised in their stead. In September, after some
vicissitudes, the new system was completed, and Terror was decreed to
be 'the order of the day.'
The form of the Revolutionary Government was simple. At its head
stood the Committee of Public Safety, the twelve kings of France.
The members of this Committee were supreme in all matters foreign
or domestic. They used the ministers as clerks and subordinates.
They resorted only as a matter of form to the Convention. They were
superior to all existing authorities, with unlimited powers, above
the law. Immediately subordinate to the Great Committee were the two
chief engines of its power--the Committee of General Security, under
Amar and Vadier, Panis and Rühl, which superintended the police work
of the Government, filled the prisons of Paris, and chose the victims
for the scaffold, and the Revolutionary Tribunal, organised afresh in
September upon a larger scale, ruled by such men as Herman, Coffinhal
and Fouquier-Tinville, and acting through the guillotine. Behind
these three important bodies were the various other agencies of the
Terror. First, in Paris, there was the redoubtable Commune, directed
by Pache, Hébert and Chaumette; the battalions of the Sections, once
the National Guard, but now represented chiefly by their cannoneers,
and placed under the command of Hanriot; the new Revolutionary Army of
Sansculottes, formed in September, 1793, and supplying an additional
force of six or seven thousand men; the Revolutionary Committees of
the forty-eight Sections, carefully sifted, organised and paid; the
Sectional meetings, now limited to two a week, and governed by a paid
majority of Sansculottes; and the great organisation of the Jacobin
Club. Then in the provinces, the Government was maintained by a similar
system of close centralisation. Special Representatives on Mission were
sent out armed with absolute powers to establish the terror in the
great cities of France. Subordinate officers, organised later under the
title of National Agents, were appointed to exercise similar powers in
the less important towns. Revolutionary Committees, organised and paid,
in every borough and considerable village, acted under the National
Agents, and in close co-operation with the local clubs. And in some
places revolutionary tribunals and revolutionary armies were formed on
the model of those in Paris.
The heads of this extraordinary system were the Committee of Public
Safety in Paris and the Representatives on Mission in the Departments.
They were the men who created the Terror, and on them the chief
responsibility rests. The Committee of Public Safety contained several
different groups. Three of its most conspicuous members, who acted
closely and consistently together, were Robespierre, Couthon and St.
Just. These men were the idealists of the Committee, all fanatical
disciples of Rousseau, all aiming at the regeneration of society and
determined to secure the triumph of their principles by any means.
Robespierre's wide popularity with the Jacobins, his character for
respectability and virtue, and his position as the typical exponent of
the party creed, made him an indispensable ally, although the more
practical among his colleagues regarded his administrative capacities
with contempt. Couthon, with his sweet voice and crippled body, and
St. Just, with his handsome face and stern demeanour, supported
Robespierre's schemes, with the same singular mixture of cruelty and
sentiment, of shallow pedantry and deep conviction. But though the
triumvirate afterwards grasped at power, and though they all took part
in shaping the principles and policy of the Terror, their influence
at first was by no means predominant, but was surpassed by that of
many of their colleagues. Allied with them in the political work of
the Committee, but more effective than they in securing its triumph,
were Billaud-Varennes and Collot d'Herbois, the real organisers of
the Terror, and among the fiercest of the ruthless men whom that
system raised to power. Beside them stood the impressionable Barère,
in some respects the most important member of the Government, who
represented the Committee in the Convention, where his fluent tongue
and easy temper made him popular, and Hérault de Séchelles the least
important of the twelve, pre-eminent in courtliness and breeding, but
most pre-eminent in society and love. The other five members of the
Committee were men whose names with one exception are little known
to-day, Lindet and Prieur of the Marne, charged with the work of
provisioning the country, Jean Bon St. André, the reorganiser of the
navy, and Carnot and Prieur of the Côte-d'Or, the organisers of the
great campaigns, which did so much to save the Committee's reputation,
and which in the eyes of many Frenchmen have half excused its faults.
In judging of this celebrated despotism no one should be permitted
to forget its arduous labours, its intrepid patriotism, its devotion
and success. The members of the Committee did not spare themselves.
Those who had special departments to attend to, like Carnot and the
Prieurs, Jean Bon St. André and Lindet, gave themselves up heart and
soul to business, worked day and night, lived in their offices, dined
sometimes on bread and water, and, engrossed in their overwhelming
duties, left to others the field of political intrigue. All their
vigour and abilities were thrown into the public service. They
accepted the Terror, as a system which it was hopeless to resist, from
necessity rather than from desire. But still they signed whatever their
colleagues put before them, and they must share the responsibility with
the rest. All the members of the Government lived at terrible pressure.
The sword hung constantly over their heads. Universal distrust was
the Jacobin shibboleth, and the genius of suspicion ruled in their
camp. Every man knew that he was watched by his colleagues. Every
man knew that his own turn might come next. 'You had your neighbour
guillotined,' said Barère afterwards, 'in order to prevent his
guillotining you.'
Under the control of the Committee of Public Safety and the
direct supervision of Billaud-Varennes and Collot d'Herbois, the
Representatives on Mission carried the Terror over France. The system
of sending out members of the Convention on special missions to the
army and the provinces had been freely adopted after the 10th August,
and was widely developed by Jacobin rule. The deputies received the
widest instructions from the Committee, which supported them through
thick and thin. They had absolute power over life and property. They
could remove and appoint officials, impose fines, levy taxes, imprison
on suspicion, try, punish and execute their prisoners, and take
any steps which they thought advisable to spread the Terror in the
districts where they ruled. Such powers in the best hands would at all
times be dangerously excessive; but confided, as they often were, to
men without principle or moderation, at a time when political passion
was furious, when suspicion was widespread and violence supreme, they
were abused to an extent which even the authors of the system hardly
contemplated, and which has rendered the annals of the Terror a black
page in the history of mankind.
It is true that the character of their government was in some places
milder than in others. Certain parts of France escaped. In several
important towns there were no executions, though prisoners were sent
up to be tried in Paris. In cities like Lyons, Marseilles and Toulon,
which had raised the standard of revolt, there was a colourable pretext
for severity. Some of the Commissioners, like Bô and Gouly, Lakanal
and André Dumont, while indulging in ferocious language, contrived to
mingle mercy with their bluster, and spared lives as often as they
dared. Some, like Ysabeau, Lecarpentier and Albitte, were averse
to wholesale executions, counted their victims by tens and not by
hundreds, and were content in their excesses to be less sanguinary than
absurd. Some, like Tallien, valued the dictatorship chiefly for the
opportunities of spoil which it afforded. Some, like St. Just, were
arbitrary only in insisting on conformity to their political ideals,
or like Couthon, mitigated the justice of the Terror with schemes of
benevolent philanthropy. Many of them seemed to act in a delirium. They
all ran the risk of denunciation and lived in fear of death.
But when all exceptions are admitted, there remain only too many
examples of the license and brutality by which the commissioners
rendered their power supreme. Some of them seemed to take pleasure in
showing how detestable tyranny could be. Even the wholesale executions
were not always the worst feature of their rule. Collot d'Herbois and
Fouché in Lyons, Lebon at Arras, Javoges at St. Etienne, and Carrier
at Nantes, acquired an infamous celebrity above the rest. Others,
like Lacombe in Bordeaux, Barras and Fréron in Marseilles and Toulon,
Reynaud and Guyardin in the department of the Haute-Loire, Maignet in
the Vaucluse, Dartigoyte in the Gers and the Landes, Borie in the Gard,
and Bernard de Saintes and Léonard Bourdon in the Côte-d'Or, fell in
demerit only behind the worst. Their despotism was less prodigal of
life; but in contempt for decency, humanity and justice, few of their
colleagues surpassed them. The first fury of the Terror was directed
against the suspected and the wealthy, against priests, capitalists
and aristocrats. But it rapidly passed on to others; and tradesmen and
farmers, working men and working women supplied their tale of victims
for the guillotine. 'I will convert this people into patriots,' cried
Baudot; 'either they or I must die.' 'We will make France a cemetery,'
echoed Carrier, 'rather than not regenerate it in our own way.'
More interesting, however, than the iniquities of the proconsuls of
the Terror, are the principles which those iniquities were intended
to enforce. There were always differences of view among the Jacobins,
and no very consistent rules governed their legislation. But still it
is possible to point to certain maxims as influencing their conduct,
maxims which, set in a different light and approached in a different
spirit, have in other ages roused enthusiasm and won respect. These
maxims found their strongest supporters in the politicians of the
Commune. Their adoption was largely due to the municipality of Paris;
and the ascendency of that party, which reached its height in November,
1793, marks the climax of the Revolution and, as regards political
doctrine, the furthest point of the democratic advance.
The chief point for which the Terrorists contended was the absolute
supremacy of the State and the entire subordination to it of individual
rights. The supremacy of the State, in the Jacobin theory, extended
over life and property alike. It was the duty of every member of the
State to work for it. It was the right of every member of the State to
be supported by it. In pursuance of these ideas the Republic asserted
its title not only to the estates of the Crown, of the Church, of the
Emigrants and the suspected, but to corporate property of every kind,
to the estates of hospitals, of scientific bodies, of educational
and benevolent institutions. It resumed all lands alienated by the
Crown during the past three hundred years. It claimed the right of
appropriating for public purposes, under the name of requisition and
at such prices as it chose to fix, all the products of commerce,
agriculture and manufacture. 'Whatever is essential to preserve life,'
said Robespierre, 'is common property to Society at large.' 'When the
public needs require it,' argued another deputy, 'all belongs to the
people and nothing to individuals.' Thus every man between eighteen
and twenty-five was required to serve in the armies of the Republic.
Thus, in order to clothe and shoe the army, tailors and shoemakers were
summoned to headquarters and required to work for the servants of the
State. In some districts all blue and green cloaks were confiscated
to the service of the Republic. Thus, too, all millers, farmers and
labourers, all who prepared food for the people, were required to
labour at the command of the State. On one occasion the Government
ordered that all the oats in the territories of the Republic should be
deposited within a week at certain specified places and surrendered
to the local authorities at the price fixed by the State. On other
occasions the authorities ordered all specie and gold and silver
articles to be surrendered for public purposes under penalty of death.
But these far-reaching claims involved very arbitrary measures. In
order to secure obedience to its commands, the State must be able to
rely upon its servants, and accordingly it imposed offices and duties,
wherever it found convenient nominees. All whom it appointed were
forced to accept, and no disclaimer was permitted. Further, the State
undertook to supervise everyone who worked for the community, all
manufacturers, cultivators and dealers. It discussed the feasibility of
converting its retail-traders into salaried servants. All those whom
it required to work had to work, whether they liked or not, or else
be denounced as 'Muscadins' and heavily punished and fined. The State
undertook to provide them with work and to settle the rate of their
wages. In certain districts the authorities were required to draw up
lists of labourers out of employment and of farms in need of labour.
The men were then supplied to the farmers, and their wages fixed by the
State. If any labourer did not have his name put down, or asked for
more than the wages fixed, he was sentenced to imprisonment in irons.
Every man had to give his services when the State demanded it, or be
punished as egoistic and refractory. If he were ruined by compliance it
was his fault, for the State could do no wrong. The State compelled for
good, and all men must obey.
In return for this implicit obedience to its calls, the State
undertook to watch over the welfare of its subjects. 'Society,' cried
Robespierre, 'must provide for the support of all its members.' A
few enthusiasts, like St. Just and Babœuf, suggested the abolition
of private property; but that view was not very widely accepted,
and the general tendency of Jacobin legislation was to distribute
property and not to forbid it. 'In a well-ordered republic,' said
Barère, 'nobody should be without some property.' Accordingly, two
broad rules were adopted, first, that no man must have too much, and
secondly, that every man must have enough. In order to secure the
first of these principles drastic measures were needed. The rich were
taxed and proscribed. Fines of enormous amount were levied on them,
recklessly imposed by any authority which had the power to enforce
payment. At the same time confiscations multiplied, and lands, houses,
plate and art treasures were swept into the coffers of the Republic. A
distinction was drawn between what was essential and what was surplus.
The essential was fixed at forty pounds a year a head. Beyond that it
was proposed that the wealthiest families should keep only an income
of a hundred and eighty pounds. 'Opulence,' declared St. Just, 'is
infamous.' 'The richest of Frenchmen,' cried Robespierre, 'ought not to
have more than a hundred and twenty pounds a year.' To guard against
inequalities of wealth in the future, freedom of bequest was abolished,
and the rights of testators were strictly limited so that their
property might be divided on their death. If a man had no children, the
State encouraged him to adopt some, in order that his estate might be
distributed amongst them. 'Equal rights,' said a deputy, 'could only be
maintained by a persistent tendency to uniformity of fortunes.'
'But,' said Barère, 'it is not enough to bleed the rich and to pull
down colossal fortunes. The slavery of poverty must be made to
disappear from the soil of the Republic.' Accordingly, for those
who had no means of subsistence the State provided in a variety of
ways. It allotted to them confiscated lands. It enrolled them in the
Revolutionary Army. It provided for them in the public service, or paid
them to attend committees, meetings and clubs. Communes were required
to draw up lists of all citizens who had no property of their own, in
order that the State might come to their relief. A 'big ledger of
national beneficence' was instituted in each department for the old,
the widowed and the infirm, so that they might receive pensions from
the State. 'Every citizen,' wrote St. Just, one of the law-givers of
the Terrorist Utopia, 'must have his own bread, his own roof, and all
that is indispensable for life. He must live independently, respect
himself, have a tidy wife and healthy and robust children.' But should
he decline to conform to this ideal, the penalty was death.
But it was not enough to furnish incomes for all; it was necessary
to take further measures to provide that the prices of necessaries
should be such that every man could buy them. Accordingly, by the
Maximum laws the State proceeded to fix a limit for the price of
bread; and from that it rapidly passed on to limit the prices of other
necessaries, of meat and vegetables, of soap and firewood, of butter,
tobacco, sugar, beer, even of manufactured articles and of raw material
as well. On the same grounds, in order to make things plentiful and
cheap, the State watched jealously over all dealers and producers.
Monopoly was made a capital crime. Manufacturers, agriculturists and
tradesmen were freely denounced as public enemies. Capitalists and
usurers were held up to public execration. The Bourse was closed.
Financial associations were suppressed. Bankers, stock-brokers,
and silver dealers were forbidden to exercise their calling. Heavy
restrictions limited the import and export trade of the country, and
the investment of capital abroad. Hébert declared that all tradesmen
were 'essentially anti-revolutionists, and would sell their country for
a few halfpence.' Other Jacobins maintained that 'nearly all farmers
were aristocrats,' and proscribed the butchers in particular as 'an
intolerable aristocracy.' The more these arbitrary measures failed,
the more implacably did their authors enforce them. Farmers were
forbidden to sell their produce privately. Shopkeepers were compelled
to offer to the public all that they had in their shops. Penalty of
death was denounced against the manufacturer who did not make full
use of his materials, penalty of death against the dealer who did not
post up a list of all that he had in stock, penalty of death against
the cultivator who did not bring his grain to market, penalty of death
against any person who kept more bread on hand than he required for his
own subsistence. Similar heavy penalties followed for all who infringed
the Maximum laws, and who would not accept the prices that the State
had fixed. Among the records of the punishments inflicted, the State is
sometimes found resorting to ruthless acts of petty tyranny, condemning
in one case to a fine of one thousand francs a woman who had ventured
to sell a candle for fivepence, sentencing to a fine of forty thousand
francs a bar-keeper who had charged tenpence for a glass of wine, and
ordering a grocer who had sold sugar-candy at a lower rate than the
authorities approved, to pay one hundred thousand francs as penalty,
and to be imprisoned until the end of the war!
Of course these arbitrary measures defeated their own ends. Instead of
making food and clothing plentiful, instead of keeping prices down,
they destroyed credit, ruined enterprise, and resulted in scarcity and
dearth. In spite of all the efforts of the Government, the value of
the Assignats steadily declined. Everyone was compelled to use them,
and to accept them at their nominal value; but everyone knew that they
were really worthless. For a time commercial prosperity disappeared. On
all sides factories failed, and workmen fell out of employment. Arthur
Young declared that the Revolution did more harm to manufactures than
to any other branch of industry in France. The proscription of the rich
wrought havoc with the industries of Paris and Lyons. The disturbances
in the West Indies dealt a heavy blow at colonial trade. The war with
England closed French ports and damaged French shipping. The war with
the other Powers shut the Continent to French goods. Observers in
Bordeaux, in Nantes and in Strasbourg, echoed the same complaints.
'Commerce here is annihilated,' wrote a Swiss banker from Paris in
November, 1793.
And as it was with the capitalists, so it was with the tradesmen, the
farmers and labourers too. No one would bow to regulations which cut
at the profits of his calling. All sorts of devices were resorted to
to evade them. Shopmen kept only a limited stock on hand, or disposed
of their goods secretly to customers who would pay a handsome price.
Smuggling steadily increased. Farmers and peasants refused to bring
their grain to market for the prices fixed by the State. They sold it
privately or hoarded it up. If defeated in these devices, they refused
to work at all, and let their crops stand unharvested in the fields.
'The bakers,' wrote a Jacobin agent from Grenoble in the winter of
1793, 'have stopped baking altogether.' 'The fishermen,' wrote another
from Marseilles, 'no longer go to sea.' Of course the State punished
them severely for their contumacy, but they would rather go to prison
than labour for no adequate reward. And so the working classes passed
into the ranks of the suspected, and the 'aristocrats and fanatics'
arrested consisted largely of shopkeepers and working men. One list of
prisoners at Strasbourg, for instance, contained the names of a number
of women whose husbands were tailors, upholsterers and chimney-sweeps,
while in country districts the farmers and peasants took the place of
the mechanics and tradesmen in the towns. In the summer of 1794, the
prisons of France were so full of country people that the Convention
became alarmed at the neglect of the land, and ordered the provisional
release in view of the harvest of large numbers of labouring men.
The effect of the reckless action of the State and of the resistance
which it provoked was to produce a general dearth. In 1792 and 1793
the harvests were by no means bad. But the utter depreciation of the
currency, the insecurity of property, the frequent seizure of grain,
and the attempts of the authorities, especially in Paris, to fix wages
and to manipulate prices, all tended to lessen the supply and to check
the free circulation of food. In the winter of 1793-94 the signs of
distress became alarming. From Lyons and Marseilles, from Rouen and
Bordeaux, there came nothing but reports of famine. 'In the district
of Cadillac,' said Tallien in March, 1794, 'absolute dearth prevails;
the citizens fight for the grass in the fields.' 'In many of the Indre
districts,' wrote another representative, 'food is entirely wanting.'
In Paris, where so many indigent were gathered, the danger, in spite
of the efforts of the municipality, was more noticeable still. Bread
was bad and scanty. Meat was terribly scarce. Vegetables and groceries
were exceedingly dear. The long _queues_ of hungry men and women, which
formed every night outside the provision-shops of Paris, waiting for
the dawn, added a grim feature to Parisian life. 'If this lasts,' said
the workmen, according to the testimony of one observer, 'we shall have
to cut each other's throats, since there is nothing left to live on.'
Beggars multiplied on every side. Those who knew the streets of Paris
spoke of the crowds of famished faces, 'everywhere presenting an image
of despair,'--into such misery had the all-governing State reduced
them, the State which only wished to be omnipotent for the noble
purpose of regenerating man.
But the State did not confine its interference to questions of property
and labour. It undertook to regulate private conduct too. The old codes
of faith and morality were swept aside. The old notions of family life
were rejected. Robespierre protested against 'the domestic federalism
which narrows the soul by keeping it isolated.' Marriages were made
the loosest contracts. 'A man and woman who love each other are
married,' cried St. Just. Paternal rights and duties were abolished.
Patriots regarded it as contrary to liberty for a father to correct
his child. The State undertook to educate its children on the most
minute and rigid system, to see to their support, to carve out their
inheritance, to dictate their morals, to form their opinions, to point
out their God. Under the influence of the materialistic school which
ruled in the Commune of Paris, and in particular of Chaumette, Hébert
and Clootz, Christianity was proscribed. 'It will not be long,' cried
an enthusiastic deputy, 'before the religion of Socrates, of Marcus
Aurelius and Cicero will be the religion of the world.' With the
sanction of the Convention, Reason was established as the faith of
the Republic. On the 10th November, 1793, the Goddess of Reason was
installed in the cathedral of Notre Dame. The churches were closed and
plundered. Priests were compelled, on pain of persecution, to abdicate
or to abjure their faith, and many scenes of license and disorder
signalised the triumph of the rationalistic creed. The action of the
Commune in Paris and of its representatives in the country districts
created widespread indignation. 'The mischief is grave, and the wound
deep,' wrote a Jacobin politician to Robespierre from Lyons. 'Stupor,
grief and consternation are depicted upon every face. The dying man
sends for the minister of religion to speak the words of peace and
consolation, and the minister is threatened with the guillotine if
he goes to perform this duty of humanity. Such is the reality of our
freedom!'
Besides the Christian religion the Terrorists repudiated the Christian
era. The new Calendar dated from the 22nd September, 1792, the day
of the proclamation of the French Republic, which became the first
day of the first year of Liberty. The old months, weeks and days were
abolished. The year was divided into twelve new months, each consisting
of thirty days,--Vendémiaire, Brumaire, Frimaire for the autumn;
Nivôse, Pluviôse, Ventôse for the winter; Germinal, Floréal, Prairial
for the spring; and Messidor, Thermidor, Fructidor for the summer.
Each month was divided into three decades, and the five days over at
the end of the year were consecrated to public festivals. With the
customs of the old world its manners disappeared. In order to enforce
social equality, all classes were compelled to adopt the habits, dress
and language of the Sansculottes. Red caps, sabots and rough clothing
became essential signs of patriotism. The graces and courtesies of life
were penal. 'It is not safe,' wrote a Parisian, as early as September,
1792, 'to walk the streets in decent clothes.' The old forms of address
disappeared and gave place to fraternal greetings. The real aristocracy
of nature and education shared the proscription of the accidental
aristocracy of birth. 'The French people,' boasted Robespierre, 'have
outstripped the rest of humanity by two thousand years.... In the rest
of Europe a ploughman or artisan is an animal formed for the pleasures
of the noble. In France the nobles are trying to transform themselves
into ploughmen and artisans, but do not succeed in obtaining that
honour.' Among other strange and trivial changes, the adoption of
new names came into fashion, names borrowed often from the heroes of
antiquity. Brutus, Anaxagoras and Scipio-Solon figured in the popular
nomenclature of the day. On the staff of the Revolutionary Tribunal one
member took the name of Tenth-of-August; another styled himself Mucius
Scaevola; and a third became Sempronius Gracchus.
Apart from these absurdities, which are only worth recording because
they illustrate the extraordinary character of the times, the natural
consequences attended the Terrorists' interference with the rules of
private conduct. No nation can with impunity cast its prejudices and
beliefs behind it. No nation can accept without suffering a brand new
code of morality and ethics even at the hands of well-intentioned
men. The result was moral disorder. When respect for conventions was
proscribed, respect for discipline and self-restraint went with it.
Parents lamented the insubordination of their children. Vice showed
itself more often unashamed. Encouraged by the legislation of the
Terror, the statistics of illegitimacy enormously increased. In the
year VI of the Republic there were more divorces than marriages in
France.
No doubt in many cases the action of the Terrorists was based upon
honest conviction. Certain members of the Government, like St. Just and
Robespierre, were idealists convinced that their tyranny was needed to
secure the reign of virtue in the world. Even among the politicians
of the Commune, from whom emanated most of the socialist experiments
and most of the extreme measures of the Terror, and with whom many of
its worst instruments were closely allied, there were, no doubt, some
men who, like Chaumette, meditated projects of benevolent philanthropy
for the reform of criminals, the alleviation of suffering and the
suppression of vice. These men saw round about them grave inequalities
and serious distress. They wished to render social wrong impossible,
and to make all men happy, patriotic and enlightened on the spot. They
wished to break down conventions which sometimes worked hardship, and
to banish what they regarded as the superstitions of the past. And
thus, having seized on absolute power, they used it to found their
dimly-seen ideal by desperate measures and in desperate haste.
But while making full allowance for the intentions of these men, and
passing over for the moment their ruinous unwisdom, we cannot shut our
eyes to the methods which they used. Political passion warps history
to its uses, and writers who have sympathised with the Terrorist
ideals, have too often refused to consider anything else. But after
all, these men were a small minority, whose maxims their colleagues
adopted, but whose scruples they pushed aside. It is not by the hopes
of a few theorists, but by the actions and character of the practical
agents of the Terror that that system must be judged. And it is on the
ground of their actions and character that the Terrorists as a party
stand condemned. The overwhelming evidence of their own statements,
of official papers and of judicial reports cannot be rejected as idle
slander. No doubt some of them acted in a delirium, under an imminent
sense of peril and at the risk of death. No doubt they all suffered
from that blunting of the moral sense, which the reckless excitement
of the Revolution seems to have produced in many minds, which alone
rendered the Terror possible, and which is so conspicuous in Napoleon,
the Revolution's conqueror and child. But still, admitting all excuses,
the record of the Terrorists is dark. Some of them, at the head, were
dangerous zealots, and some were colourless or unwilling assistants.
But many of them, especially the subordinate agents and those who were
ranked among the followers of Hébert, were ignorant and unprincipled,
cruel and corrupt.
One characteristic of the party was the license which marked their
speech and conduct. Coarseness of language was not uncommon among
Jacobin politicians, and even the greatest of them, like Danton, shared
it. In many cases the habit was not natural, but was deliberately
affected for a political purpose, and cultivated as a sign of
democracy and in order to win popularity with the mob. It was in men
like Hébert and his allies that this contemptible fashion reached
its climax. Hébert made his political reputation by it. His journal,
the _Père Duchesne_, which raised him to notoriety and power, was
started with the express intention of appealing to the obscene tastes
of the multitude, and its scandalous impurity has probably never been
surpassed. Of what calibre must the men have been who were driven
to such methods of acquiring fame? Their language, however, would
have mattered little, had it not been so often reflected in their
conduct, and had they not possessed the power to abolish, with the
aid of the guillotine, all those laws and decorums by which society
protects itself. Hébert had no lack of imitators among the men whom
the Terror raised to power. Guffroy, a member of the Committee of
General Security, started a paper in the same style. Javogues and
Dartigoyte, Vacheron, Laplanche and others preached and adopted in the
departments the morality of Père Duchesne, and those below them in
the hierarchy of the Terror rivalled or exceeded the example of their
chiefs. Nor can one overlook the ferocity which so many Terrorists
displayed. The records of despotism contain few things which surpass
the sanguinary rigour of Collot d'Herbois, Fréron and Lebon, the
iniquities permitted by Ronsin, the hero of the Revolutionary Army,
and by Fouquier-Tinville, the hero of the Revolutionary Tribunal,
the cynical cruelty of a Fouché watching a massacre from a window,
lorgnette in hand, the savagery of a Carrier, who declared that he
had never laughed so much in his life as he did at the contortions of
his victims, the pitiless fanaticism of a Robespierre, who, after ten
months of the Terror, insisted on fresh legislation for simplifying
trials and facilitating death, the terrible ingenuity of a Vadier, who
invented the idea of getting up conspiracies in the prisons so as to
furnish more victims for the scaffold, or the barbarity of a Government
which, while endorsing this iniquitous device, proposed to shoot all
its prisoners of war, and would have done so, had not its own officers
refused to carry the order out.
But if some of the leading Terrorists were worthless, many of their
subordinates were worse. The character of the men who carried out
the system in the Sections of Paris and in the towns and villages of
France, who governed the clubs, ruled the committees and composed the
armed force, was generally unredeemed by any larger public motives. Not
only were they very rough and ignorant, but they were necessarily men
without scruples. No others would perform the duties of the Terror or
execute the orders that came from above. Their powers being enormous,
their opportunities for tyranny and plunder were unlimited, and those
opportunities were constantly abused. Money levied recklessly upon the
rich never reached the coffers of the State. Salaries were multiplied
to an extraordinary degree. Cambon, speaking for the Treasury, bore
witness to the wholesale peculation. A hundred other witnesses have
brought forward instances of corruption and excess, and even of
debauchery and crime. The armed force on which the small minority
of Terrorists relied to maintain their precarious authority, freely
enlisted the most ruffianly recruits. Their own general described them
as 'scoundrels and brigands,' and excused himself by pleading that
'honest men could not be found to undertake such work.' Such a class
exists in every country, especially in countries that have been long
mis-ruled; but civilised communities place it under strict restraint.
The Jacobins, on the other hand, invited it to govern, and invested
it with despotic powers. It is noticeable that many of the Jacobin
agents were men who had failed in the ordinary walks of life, and who
were consequently bitter against social laws. In their compassion for
suffering and their contempt for the magic of wealth, the Jacobins
fell into the opposite excess, professed to find magic in poverty, and
regarded ignorance and destitution as entitled to honour in themselves.
Recalling the doctrine of their master, that in a state of Nature men's
instincts are good, they refused to recognise the frailty of humanity,
and forgot that misfortune is sometimes due to fault. Strange as the
truth appears, it would seem to be indisputably proved that under the
Terror the Government of France fell largely into the hands of the
unscrupulous and worthless, and that the doctrine of the sovereignty
of the people, once welcomed with such pure enthusiasm, came to mean
the tyranny of the lowest of the people, not only of the lowest in
wealth and station--that would not have mattered--but of the lowest in
education and capacity, in nature and in morals too.
It is difficult to believe that Carnot and Lindet, or even Robespierre
and St. Just, could have cordially approved of such a system. But
that they sanctioned it is clear. Some, like Carnot, shut their
eyes, feeling that it was no use to interfere. Others, like St. Just
and Robespierre, took refuge in their resolutely blind fanaticism.
'Patriots' could not do wrong, and if their own friends brought them
proof to the contrary, they refused, except in the grossest cases, to
listen or believe. They had to use such weapons as they could find,
and they comforted their consciences with general declarations. 'The
Jacobins,' cried Collot d'Herbois, 'are compassionate, humane and
generous. These virtues, however, they reserve for patriots who are
their brethren, and not for aristocrats.' Most of them believed the
Terror to be needed. 'It is necessary,' said Billaud, 'that the people
should be created anew.' Even Jean Bon St. André insisted that, in
order to establish the ideal Republic, half the population of France
must be destroyed. 'Our purpose,' Robespierre steadily protested, 'is
to substitute morality for egotism, honesty for honour, principles
for usages, ... the empire of reason for the tyranny of fashion, ...
nobleness for vanity, love of glory for the love of gain,' but in order
to fulfil their virtuous purpose, the Terrorists called in the help of
the depraved.
These considerations may serve to explain the catastrophe of the
leaders of the Terror. So far as their experiments were honest and
high-motived, they will always be of interest to the world. But even as
reformers their failure was complete. The effects of their desperate
action were disastrous. Their methods utterly discredited their cause,
and occasioned an infinite amount of suffering to France. And while
in part, no doubt, they failed through ignorance, they failed chiefly
because so many of them were bad men. In the end, the Terrorists did
little materially or morally to raise the level of life, little to
advance the equality which they longed for, and to which men march
through order, not through crime. Of all their work, strenuous and
heroic as it often was, only one part, the war, entirely prospered.
For under the Terror Frenchmen threw into the war the irresistible
enthusiasm which the Revolution had created, and which they could no
longer feel for politics at home. The Terror was never sanctioned by
France, and it never will receive the sanction of posterity. To assume
that it was necessary is only one among the many sophisms which weak
and well-intentioned men advance for palliating wrong. Even the excuse
of national peril was wanting, for the ease with which the Jacobins
in Paris subdued their enemies in the summer of 1793, shows how
powerful their position was, and in the winter of that year all serious
danger of invasion disappeared. The Terror was necessary to keep the
Terrorists in power, and to enable them to carry out their views.
But it was necessary for no other purpose, and certainly not for the
salvation of France.