Roland, and you will see to what extremes of bitterness the language of
deceived ambition can go. They are paroxysms of rage, howls of anger,
shrieks of despair. Consider the difference between philosophy and
religion! The philosophers curse, and the Christian pardons. Yes, as
Edgar Quinet has said, "Louis XVI. alone speaks of forgiveness on that
scaffold to which the others were to bring thoughts of vengeance and
despair. And by that he seems still to reign over those who were to
follow him in death with the passions and the furies of earth." Louis
XVI. will be magnanimous and calm. A celestial sweetness will
overspread his royal countenance. An infernal rage will distort the
heart and the features of the Girondins. What pains, what tortures, in
their death-struggle! Earth fails them, and they do not look to
heaven. What accents of disgust and hatred when they speak of their
former accomplices, now become their executioners!
"Great God!" Buzot will say, "if it is only by such men and such
infamous means that republics {381} can arise and be consolidated,
there is no government more frightful on this earth nor more fatal to
human happiness." He will address these insults, worthy of the
imprecations of Camillus, to the city of Paris: "I say truly, that
France can expect neither liberty nor happiness except from the
irreparable destruction of that capital."
Barbaroux will be still more severe. His anathemas are launched not
only at Paris, but at all France. "The people," he says, "do not
deserve that one should become attached to them, for they are
essentially ungrateful. It is the absurdest folly to try to conduct to
liberty people without morals, who blaspheme God and adore Marat.
These people are no more fit for a philosophic government than the
lazzaroni of Naples or the cannibals of America.... Liberty, virtue,
sacred rights of men, to-day you are nothing but empty names." Petion,
before dying, will write to his son this letter, which is like the
testament of the Gironde: "My greatest torment will be to think that so
many crimes went unpunished; vengeance is here the most sacred of
duties.... My son, either the murderers of thy father and thy country
will be delivered to the severities of the law and expiate their crimes
upon the scaffold, or thou art under obligation to free thy country
from them. They have broken all the ties of society; their crimes are
of such a nature that they do not fall under ordinary rules. From such
monsters every one is authorized to purge the earth."
{382}
Madame Roland will be not less vehement than Buzot, Barbaroux, and
Petion. She will address these severe but just reproaches to her
friends who had not been valiant enough in their own defence: "They
temporized with crime, the cowards! They were to fall in their turn,
but they succumb shamefully, pitied by nobody, and with nothing to
expect from posterity but utter contempt.... Rather than obey their
tyrants, than descend from the bar and go out of the Assembly like a
timid flock about to be branded by the butcher, why did they not do
justice to themselves by falling on the monsters to annihilate them
rather than be sentenced by them?" It is not her friends alone whom
her anger will lash, but the sovereign people, the people once so
flattered, whom she will pursue with her anathemas. "The people," she
will say, "can feel nothing but the cannibal joy of seeing blood flow,
in order that they may run no risk of shedding their own. That
predicted time has come when, if they ask for bread, dead bodies will
be given them; but their degraded nature takes pleasure in the
spectacle, and the satisfied instinct of cruelty makes the dearth
supportable until it becomes absolute." The Egeria of the Girondins
will comprehend that all is lost, that even her blood will be sterile,
and that France is condemned either to anarchy or a dictatorship.
"Liberty," she will exclaim, "was not made for this corrupt nation,
which leaves the bed of debauchery or the dunghill of poverty only to
brutalize itself in license, and howl as it {383} wallows in the blood
streaming from scaffolds." Like the damned souls in Dante, Madame
Roland will leave all hope behind, and when, a few days after Marie
Antoinette, she ascends the steps of the guillotine, instead of
thinking of heaven, like the Queen, she will address this sarcastic
speech to the plaster statue which has replaced that of Louis XV.: "O
Liberty! how they have betrayed thee!"
But let us not anticipate. The Girondins are still to have a glimmer
of joy. The Republic is about to be proclaimed.
[1] The bloody _knife_ of tyranny is lifted against us.
{384}
XXXVII.
THE PROCLAMATION OF THE REPUBLIC.
"One of the astonishing things in the French Revolution," says one of
the most eminent writers of the democratic school, Edgar Quinet, "is
the unexpectedness with which the great changes occur. The most
important events, the destruction of the monarchy and the advent of the
Republic, came about without any previous warning." The most ardent
republicans were royalists, not merely under the old regime, but after
1789, and even up to August 10, 1792. Marat wrote, in No. 374 of the
_Ami du Peuple_, February 17, 1791: "I have often been represented as a
mortal enemy of royalty, but I claim that the King has no better friend
than myself." And he added: "As to Louis XVI. personally, I know very
well that his defects are chargeable solely to his education, and that
by nature he is an excellent sort of man, whom one would have cited as
a worthy citizen if he had not had the misfortune to be born on the
throne; but, such as he is, he is at all events the King we want. We
ought to thank Heaven for having given him to us. We ought to pray
that he may be spared to us." Marat praying, {385} Marat thanking
Heaven! and for whom? For the King. Does not that prove what deep
root royalty had taken in France? April 20, 1792, the same Marat
bitterly reproached Condorcet with "shamelessly calumniating the
Jacobin Club, and perfidiously accusing it of wishing to destroy the
monarchy" (_L' Ami du Peuple_, No. 434). June 13, he attacked those
who violated the oath taken at the time of the Federation, and said:
"To defend the Constitution is the same thing as to be faithful to the
nation, the law, and the King" (_L' Ami du Peuple_, No. 448).
During the entire continuance of the Legislative Assembly, when
Robespierre, having left the tribune, was pretending to educate the
people by means of his journal, what he defended to the utmost was the
royal Constitution. Madame Roland relates that after the flight to
Varennes, when the prospect of a republic loomed up, possibly for the
first time, at a secret meeting, Robespierre, grinning as usual, and
biting his nails, asked ironically what a republic might be. In June,
1792, the entire Jacobin Club was royalist still. It proposed to drop
Billaud-Varennes, because Billaud-Varennes had dared to put the
monarchical principle in question. On the 7th of July following, two
months and a half, that is, before the opening of the Convention, at
the time of the famous Lamourette Kiss, all the members of the Assembly
swore to execrate the Republic forever. Three weeks after September 2,
Danton alleged the paucity and the weakness of the republicans,
compared with the royalists, as {386} motives for the massacres.
Petion has said: "When the insurrection of August 10 was undertaken,
there were but five men in France who desired a republic."
Buzot, Madame Roland's idol, has written: "A wretched mob,
unintelligent and unenlightened, vomited forth insults against royalty;
the rest neither desired nor willed anything but the Constitution of
1791, and spoke of the republicans just as one speaks of extremely
honest fools. This people is republican only through force of the
guillotine." And yet, September 21, 1792, the Convention, holding its
first sitting in the Hall of the Manege, began by proclaiming the
Republic.
Buzot, in his Memoirs, has thus described the deputations that were
sent to the bar, and the public that occupied the galleries: "It seemed
as if the outlet of every sewer in Paris and other great cities had
been searched for whatever was most filthy, hideous, and infected.
Villainously dirty faces, surmounted by shocks of greasy hair, and with
eyes half sunk into their heads, they spat out, with their nauseating
breath, the grossest insults mingled with the sharp snarls of
carnivorous beasts. The galleries were worthy of such legislators: men
whose frightful aspect betokened crime and poverty, and women whose
shameless faces expressed the filthiest debauchery. When all these
with hands and feet and voice made their horrible racket, one seemed to
be in an assembly of devils."
When the session opened, Collot d'Herbois was {387} the first speaker.
He said: "There is a matter which you cannot put off until to-morrow,
which you cannot put off until this evening, which you cannot defer for
a single instant without being unfaithful to the wishes of the nation;
it is the abolition of royalty." Quinet having objected that it would
be better to present this question when the Constitution was to be
discussed, Gregoire, constitutional Bishop of Blois, exclaimed:
"Certainly, no one will ever propose to us to preserve the deadly race
of kings in France. All the dynasties have been breeds of ravenous
beasts, living on nothing but human flesh; still it is necessary to
reassure plainly the friends of liberty; this magic talisman, which
still has power to stupefy so many men, must be destroyed." Bazire
remarked that it would be a frightful example to the people to see an
Assembly which they had entrusted with their dearest interests, resolve
upon anything in a moment of enthusiasm and without thorough
discussion. Gregoire replied with vehemence: "Eh! what need is there
of discussion when everybody is of the same mind? Kings, in the moral
order, are what monsters are in the physical order. Courts are the
workshop of crime and the lair of tyrants. The history of kings is the
martyrology of nations; we are all equally penetrated by this truth.
What is the use of discussing it?" Then the question, put to vote in
these terms: "The National Convention declares that royalty is
abolished in France," was adopted amidst applause.
{388}
At four in the afternoon of the same day, a municipal officer named
Lubin, surrounded by mounted gendarmes and a large crowd of people,
came to read a proclamation before the Temple tower. The trumpets were
sounded. A great silence ensued, and Lubin, who had a stentorian
voice, read loud enough to be heard by the royal family confined in the
dungeon, this proclamation, the death knell of monarchy: "Royalty is
abolished in France. All public acts will be dated from the first year
of the Republic. The seal of State will be inscribed with this motto:
_Republique francaise_. The National Seal will represent a woman
seated on a sheaf of arms, holding in one hand a pike surmounted by a
liberty-cap." Hebert (the famous Pere Duchesne) was at this moment on
guard near the royal family. Sitting on the threshold of their
chamber, he sought to discover a movement of vexation or anger, or any
other emotion on their faces. He was unsuccessful. While listening to
the revolutionary decree which snatched away his throne, the descendant
of Saint Louis, Henry IV., and Louis XIV. experienced not the slightest
trouble. He had a book in his hand, and he quietly went on reading it.
As impassive as her spouse, the Queen neither made a movement nor
uttered a word. When the proclamation was finished, the trumpets
sounded again. Clery then went to the window, and the eyes of the
crowd turned instantly towards him. As they mistook him for Louis
XVI., they overwhelmed him with insults. The gendarmes made
threatening {389} gestures, and he was obliged to withdraw so as to
quiet the tumult. While the populace was unchained around the Temple
prison, one man alone was calm, one man alone seemed a stranger to all
anxiety: it was the prisoner.
A new era begins. The death-struggle of royalty is over. Royalty is
dead, and the King is soon to die. Gregoire, who had stolen the vote
(there were but 371 conventionists present; 374 were absent; that is to
say, more than half), is both surprised and enthusiastic about what he
has done. He confesses that for several days his excessive joy
deprived him of appetite and sleep. Such joy will not last very long.
M. Taine compares revolutionary France to a badly nourished workman,
poor, and overdriven with toil, and yet who drinks strong liquors. At
first, in his intoxication, he thinks he is a millionnaire, loved and
admired; he thinks himself a king. "But soon the radiant visions give
place to black and monstrous phantoms.... At present, France has
passed through the period of joyous delirium, and is about to enter on
another that is sombre; behold it, capable of daring, suffering, and
doing all things, whenever its guides, as widely astray as itself,
shall point out an enemy or an obstacle to its fury."
How quickly the disenchantments come! Already Lafayette, the man of
generous illusions, has had to imitate the conduct of those _emigres_
on whom he has been so severe. He has fled to a foreign land, and
found there not a refuge, but a prison. He will {390} remain more than
five years in the gloomy fortress of Olmutz. The victor of Valmy,
Dumouriez, will hardly be more fortunate. He will go over to the
enemy, and live in exile on a pension from foreign powers. How close
together deceptions and recantations come! Marat, who had already said
to the inhabitants of the capital: "Eternal cockneys, with what
epithets would I not assail you in the transports of my despair, if I
knew any more humiliating than that of Parisians?"[1] Marat, who had
said to all Frenchmen: "No, no; liberty is not made for an ignorant,
light, and frivolous nation, for cits brought up in fear,
dissimulation, knavery, and lying, nourished in cunning, intrigue,
sycophancy, avarice, and swindling, subsisting only by theft and
rapine, aspiring after nothing but pleasures, titles, and decorations,
and always ready to sell themselves for gold!"[2] Marat will write,
May 7th, 1793, that is to say, at the apogee of his favorite political
system: "All measures taken up to the present day by the assemblies,
constituent, legislative, and conventional, to establish and
consolidate liberty, have been thoughtless, vain, and illusory, even
supposing them to have been taken in good faith. The greater part seem
to have had for their object to perpetuate oppression, bring on
anarchy, death, poverty, and famine; to make the people weary of their
independence, to make liberty a burden, to cause them to {391} detest
the Revolution, through its excessive disorders, to exhaust them by
watching, fatigue, want, and inanition, to reduce them to despair by
hunger, and to bring them back to despotism by civil war."[3]
There were six ministers appointed on August 10. Two of them, Claviere
and Roland, will kill themselves; two others, Lebrun-Tondu and Danton,
will be guillotined; the remaining two, Servan and Monge, are destined
to become, one a general of division under Napoleon, and the other a
senator of the Empire and Count of Peluse; and when, at the beginning
of his reign, the Emperor complains to the latter because there are
still partisans of the Republic to be found: "Sire," the former
minister of August 10 will answer, "we had so much trouble to make them
republicans! may it please Your Majesty kindly to allow them at least a
few days to become imperialists!" Of the two men who had so
enthusiastically brought about the proclamation of the Republic, one,
Collot d'Herbois, will be transported to Guiana by the republicans, and
die there in a paroxysm of burning fever; the other, Gregoire, will be
a senator of the Empire, which will not, however, prevent him from
promoting the deposition of Napoleon as he had promoted that of Louis
XVI. There are men who will exchange the jacket of the _sans-culotte_
for the gilded livery of an imperial functionary. The conventionists
and regicides are {392} transformed into dukes and counts and barons.
David, the official painter of the Empire, Napoleon's favorite, will
paint with joy the picture of a pope, and be very proud of his great
picture of the new Charlemagne's coronation. But listen to Edgar
Quinet: "When I see the orators of deputations taking things with such
a high hand at the bar, and lording it so proudly over mute and
complaisant assemblies, I should like to know what became of them a few
years later." And thereupon he sets out to discover their traces. But
after considerable investigation he stops. "If I searched any
further," he exclaims, "I should be afraid of encountering them among
the petty employes of the Empire. It was quite enough to see Huguenin,
the indomitable president of the insurrectionary Commune, so quickly
tamed, soliciting and obtaining a post as clerk of town gates as soon
as absolute power made its reappearance after the 18th Brumaire. The
terrible Santerre becomes the gentlest of men as soon as he is
pensioned by the First Consul. Hardly had Bourdon de l'Oise and
Albitte, those men of iron, felt the rod than you see them the supplest
functionaries of the Empire. The great king-taker, Drouet, thrones it
in the sub-prefecture of Sainte-Menehould. Napoleon has related that,
on August 10, he was in a shop in the Carrousel, whence he witnessed
the taking of the palace. If he had a presentiment then, he must have
smiled at the chaos which he was to reduce so easily to its former
limits. How many furies, and all to terminate so soon in the
accustomed obedience!"
{393}
Is not history, with its perpetual alternatives of license and
despotism, like a vicious circle? And do not the nations pass their
time in producing webs of Penelope, whose bloody threads they weave and
unweave again with tears? All governments, royalties, empires,
republics, ought to be more modest. But all, profoundly forgetful of
the lessons of the past, believe themselves immortal. All declare
haughtily that they have closed forever the era of revolutions.
With the advent of the Republic a new calendar had been put in force.
The equality of days and nights at the autumnal equinox opened the era
of civil equality on September 22. "Who would have believed that this
human geometry, so profoundly calculated, was written in the sand, and
that in a few years no traces of it would remain? ... The heavens have
continued to gravitate, and have brought back the equality of days and
nights; but they have allowed the promised liberty and equality to
perish, like meteors that vanish in empty space.... The
_sans-culottes_ have not been able to make themselves popular among the
starry peoples.... An ancient belief which the men of the Revolution
had neglected through fear or through contempt was again met with; a
spectre had appeared; a chilly breath, like that of Samuel, had made
itself felt; and lo, the edifice so sagely constructed, and leaning on
the worlds, has vanished away."[4]
{394}
There lies at the foundation of history a supreme sadness and
melancholy. This never-ending series of illusions and deceptions,
errors and afflictions, faults and crimes; this rage, and passion, and
folly; so many efforts and fatigues, so many dangers, tortures, and
tears, so much blood, such revolutions, catastrophies, cataclysms of
every sort,--and all for what? Wretched humanity, rolling its stone of
Sisyphus from age to age, inspires far more compassion than contempt.
The painful reflections caused by the annals of all peoples are perhaps
more sombre for the French Revolution than for any other period. Edgar
Quinet justly laments over the inequality between the sacrifices of the
victims and the results obtained by posterity. He affirms that in
other histories one thing reconciles us to the fury of men, and that is
the speedy fecundity of the blood they shed; for example, when one sees
that of the martyrs flow, one also sees Christianity spread over the
earth from the depth of the catacombs; while amongst us, the blood
which streamed most abundantly and from such lofty sources, did not
find soil equally well prepared. And the illustrious historian
exclaims sadly: "The supreme consolation has been refused to our
greatest dead; their blood has not been a seed of virtue and
independence for their posterity. If they should reappear once more,
they would feel themselves tortured again, and on a worse scaffold, by
the denial of their descendants; they would hurl at us again the same
adieu: 'O Liberty! how they have betrayed thee!'"
[1] _Ami du Peuple_, No. 429.
[2] _Ami du Peuple_, No. 539.
[3] _La Publiciste de la Republique_, No. 211.
[4] Edgar Quinet, _La Revolution_, t. 11.
{395}
INDEX.
Abbey prison, the, massacre of the prisoners of, 363.
Ankarstroem, Captain, the assassin of Gustavus III., 37, 41.
Arles, Archbishop of, massacre of, 364.
Assassins, the, of the September massacres, 362 _et seq._; their fate,
370.
Assignats created, 128.
Aubier, M. d', on the King's unwar-like disposition, 288; with the King
in the Convent of the Feuillants, 330.
Barbaroux, visionary schemes of, 271; declares the King might have
maintained himself, 285; anathemas of, on the Septembrists, 381.
Barry, Madame du, her letter to Marie Antoinette, 138.
Beaumarchais compared with Dumouriez, 95.
Belgium, the invasion of, a failure, 136.
Beugnot, Count, his description of Madame Roland, 87, 92; philosophic
remarks of, on woman, 108.
Billaud-Varennes, 246; at the Abbey, 363.
Blanc, M. Louis, quoted, 370.
Bonne-Carrere, director of foreign affairs, portrait of, 101.
Bossuet quoted, 134.
Bouille, Count de, warns Gustavus III. of the conspiracy against him,
38; his judgment on Gustavus III., 43.
Bouille, Marquis de, suppresses the insurrection at Nancy, 111, 133.
Brissac, Duke of, his devotion to royalty, 137 _et seq._; intolerable
to the Jacobins, 141; accused in the Assembly, 144; assassinated, 147,
369.
Brunswick, Duke of, his manifesto, 267.
Buzot, Madame Roland's affection for, 64; quoted, 386.
Calvet, M., sent to the Abbey, 144.
Campan, Madame, describes the Queen's emotion on hearing of her
brother's death, 28; her account of Dumouriez' interview with the
Queen, 155; in peril in the Tuileries, 324.
Carmelite church, massacre at, 364.
Chateaubriand, quotation from, 9.
Chateauvieux, the fete of, 110 _et seq._, mutinous soldiers of,
punished, 112; feted by the Jacobins, 113, 118; admitted to the
Assembly, 117.
Chenier, Andre, patriotic conduct of, 113, 124; his ode to David, 119;
his fate, 124.
Claviere made Minister of the Finances, 103, 160.
Clootz, Anacharsis, defends the September massacres, 375.
_Comedie-Francaise_, the, in the Revolution, 10.
Commune, insurrectionary, formed in the Hotel-de-Ville, 281; refuse to
extinguish the fire at the Tuileries, 325, 335, 345, 355; invites every
commune in France to follow the example of massacre in Paris, 369;
terrorize the Assembly, 370; order the arrest of Roland, 374, 378.
Constitutional Guard, the composition of, 140; disarmed, 145.
Cordeliers, club of the, 7; chiefs of, 7; decide to attack the
Tuileries, 274.
Danjou turns the mob bearing the Princess de Lamballe's head away from
the Temple, 355.
Danton, cowardice of, 271, 316; his bloodthirsty speech to the
Assembly, 361, 374; fate of, 391.
Dauphin, the, the red cap set on his head, 213; his interest in the
guard, Drouet, 217, 219; his prayer for the King, 220; on the morning
of August 10, 284; taken from his mother's arms by an insurrectionist,
297; in the Assembly, 299; in the Convent of the Feuillants, 329, 333;
prayer taught him by his mother, 347.
David, his part in the fete of Chateauvieux, 119; conversation of, 319;
under the Empire, 392.
Delorme, the negro assassin, 367.
Desilles, killed in the insurrection at Nancy, 111.
Drouet, the royalist guard, 217.