_From April 1793 to July 1794._
The first division of this period, which ends in the height of the
summer of 1793, is the gradual consolidation of the Committee as a new
organ of government and the peril of destruction which it runs, in
common with the nation it governs at the hands of allied Europe.
The second period includes part of August and all the rest of 1793, and
the first seven months of 1794, during which time the Committee is
successful in its military effort, the nation is saved, and in a manner
curiously dramatic and curiously inconsequential, the martial _régime_
of the Terror abruptly ceases.
The first step in the consolidation of the power of the Committee was
their letting loose of the Commune of Paris and the populace it governed
against the Girondins.
Looked at merely from the point of view of internal politics (upon
which most historians have concentrated) the attack of the populace of
Paris and their Commune against the Parliament seems to be no more than
the end of the long quarrel between the Girondins with their ideal
federal republic, and the capital with its instinct for strong
centralised government. But in the light of the military situation, of
which the Committee of Public Safety were vividly aware, and which it
was their business to control, a very different tale may be told.
When the defeats began the Parliament had voted a levy of three hundred
thousand men. It was a mere vote which came to very little: not enough
in numbers and still less in moral, for the type of troops recruited
under a system of money forfeit and purchased substitutes was wholly
beneath the task of the great war.
This law of conscription had been passed upon the 24th of February. The
date for its first application was, in many villages, fixed for the 10th
of March. All that country which borders the estuary of the Loire, to
the north and to the south, a country whose geographical and political
peculiarities need not here detain us, but which is still curiously
individual, began to resist. The decree was unpopular everywhere, of
course, as military service is everywhere unpopular with a settled
population. But here it had no ally, for the Revolution and all its
works were grossly unpopular as well. The error of the Civil
Constitution of the Clergy was a powerful factor in this revolt. The
piety and the orthodoxy of this district were and are exceptional. Some
such resistance in some such quarter was perhaps expected: what was not
expected was its military success.
Four days before the defeat of Neerwinden itself, and four days after
the decree of conscription in the villages, a horde of peasantry had
taken possession of the town of Chollet in the southern part of this
district, Vendée. Three days before the Committee of Public Safety was
formed the insurgents had defeated regular forces at Machecoul, and had
tortured and put to death their prisoners. The month of April, when the
Committee of Public Safety was first finding its seat in the saddle, saw
the complete success of the rebels. The forces sent against them were
worthless, for all military effort had been concentrated upon the
frontier. Most of them were not even what we should call militia. A
small force of regulars was to have moved from Orleans, but, before they
could attack, Thouars, Parthenay, and Fontenay fell into the power of
the rebels. These posts afforded an advanced triangle right into the
regularly administered territory of the Republic: the great town of
Nantes was outflanked. Even in such a moment the Girondins still clung
to their ideal: an individually free and locally autonomous republic. It
is little wonder that the temper of Paris refused to support them, or
their influence over the Parliament, and we can easily understand how
the new Committee supported Paris in its revolt.
That revolt took place on the 31st of May. The forces under the command
of the capital did not march, but a deputation of the sections of Paris
demanded the arrest of the leading Girondins. The body of the debating
hall was invaded by the mob. The Committee of Public Safety pretended to
compromise between Paris and the Parliament, but a document, recently
analysed, sufficiently proves that their sympathy was with the Parisian
attack. They proposed, indeed, to put the armed force of Paris at the
disposition of the Assembly: that is, in their own hands.
That day nothing of moment was done, but the Parliament had proved of no
strength in the face of the capital. On the frontier the advance of the
invaders had begun. The great barrier fortress of Valenciennes relied
for its defence upon the neighbouring camp of Famars. The garrison of
that camp had been compelled to evacuate it by the advance of the Allied
Army upon the 23rd of May, and though some days were to be spent before
the heavy artillery of the Austrians could be emplaced, Valenciennes was
henceforward at the mercy of its besiegers. There was news that La
Vendée was not the only rebellion. Lyons had risen three days before.
There had been heavy fighting. The Royalists and the Girondins had
combined and had carried the town hall and established an
insurrectionary and unelected Municipal Government. Such news, coming
immediately after the 31st of May, roused the capital to action. This
time the Parisian forces actually marched against the Parliament. The
demand for the suspension of the twenty-two named Girondin deputies was
made under arms. Much has been written, and by the best historians, to
make of this successful day a mere conquest by the Commune of Paris over
the Parliament. Though Barère and Danton both protested in public, it
was in reality their politics that conquered with Paris. To the
twenty-two names that the forces of Paris had listed, seven were added.
The great Girondins, Brissot, Vergniaud and the rest, were not indeed
imprisoned, they were considered “under arrest in their houses.” But the
moral authority of the Convention as an administrative machine, not as a
legislative one, was broken on this day, the 2nd of June, 1793. Paris
had ostensibly conquered, but the master who was stronger than ever and
whom Paris had served, was the Committee of Public Safety.
This first Committee of Public Safety endured to the 10th of July. In
the midst of such a war and of such an internal struggle the Convention
had voted (upon the initiative of the Committee of Public Safety) the
famous Constitution of ’93, that prime document of democracy which, as
though to mock its own ideal, has remained no more than a written thing
from then until now. Therein will be found universal suffrage, therein
the yearly Parliament, therein the referendum, therein the elected
Executive--a thing no Parliament would ever give us to-day. The
Constitution was passed but three weeks after the successful
insurrection of Paris. A fortnight later still, on the 10th of July, the
first of the Committees of Public Safety was followed by its successor.
All this while the Vendeans were advancing. Nantes, indeed, had held out
against the rebels, but as we shall see in a moment, the Republican
troops had not yet made themselves good. The rebellion of Lyons was
fortifying itself, and a week later was to execute the Radical Chalier.
Marseilles was rising. On the 10th of July the Convention summoned to
its bar Westermann, the friend of Danton, who had just suffered defeat
at the hands of the western rebels.
It is well to note at this point one of those small individual factors
which determine the fate of States. Danton, the master of all that first
movement towards centralisation, the man who had made the 10th of
August, who had negotiated with the Prussians after Valmy, who had
determined upon and formed a central government against the Girondin
anarchy--had broken down. His health was gone. He was a giant in body,
but for the moment he had tired himself out.
The renewing of his Committee was proposed: he was thrust out from the
new choice. Barère remained to link the old Committee with the new. A
violent sectarian Calvinist pastor, Jeanbon Saint-André, among the
bravest and most warped of the Revolutionaries; Couthon, a friend of
Robespierre; Saint-Just, a still more intimate friend (a young,
handsome, enormously courageous and decisive man), entered, with others
to the number of nine, the new Committee. Seventeen days later, on the
27th of July, Robespierre replaced one of the minor members thus chosen.
He had precisely a year to live, and it is the moment for fixing before
the reader’s mind the nature of his career.
Robespierre was at this moment the chief figure in the eyes of the
crowd, and was soon to be the chief revolutionary figure in the eyes of
Europe: that is the first point. The second is of equal importance, and
is far less generally recognised. He was not, and was never destined to
be, the chief force in the revolutionary Government.
As to the first point, Robespierre had attained this position from the
following combination of circumstances: first, alone of the
revolutionary personalities, he had been continually before the public
eye from the beginning; he had been a member of the first Parliament of
all and had spoken in that Parliament in the first month of its
sessions. Though then obscure in Versailles, he was already well known
in his province and native town of Arras.
Secondly, this position of his in the public eye was maintained without
a break, and his position and reputation had increased by accumulation
month after month for the whole four years. No one else was left in the
political arena of whom this could be said. All the old reactionaries
had gone, all the moderate men had gone; the figures of 1793 were all
new figures--except Robespierre; and he owed this continued and steady
increase of fame to:--
Thirdly, his conspicuous and vivid sincerity. He was more wholly
possessed of the democratic faith of the _Contrat Social_ than any other
man of his time: he had never swerved from an article of it. There is no
better engine for enduring fame than the expression of real convictions.
Moreover--
Fourthly, his speeches exactly echoed the opinions of his audience, and
echoed them with a lucidity which his audience could not have commanded.
Whether he possessed true eloquence or no is a matter still debated by
those who are scholars in French letters. But it is certain that he had
in his own time all the effects of a great orator, though his manner was
precise and cold.
Fifthly, he was possessed of a consistent body of doctrine: that is, he
was not only convinced of the general democratic creed which his
contemporaries held, and he not only held it unswervingly and
uncorruptedly, but he could supplement it with a system of morals and
even something which was the adumbration of religion.
Sixthly, he had, as such characters always can, but not often do, gather
round themselves, a group of intensely devoted personal admirers and
supporters, chief of whom was the young and splendidly courageous
Saint-Just.
It was the combination of all these things, I say, which made
Robespierre the chief personality in the public eye when he entered the
Committee of Public Safety on the 27th of July, 1793.
Now let it be noted that, unlike his follower Saint-Just, and
exceedingly unlike Danton, Robespierre possessed none of those military
qualities without which it is impossible to be responsible for
government over a military nation--especially if that nation be in the
act of war: and such a war! The Committee of Public Safety was the Cæsar
of revolutionary France. Robespierre as a member of that Cæsar was
hopeless. His popularity was an advantage to his colleagues in the
Committee, but his conception of action upon the frontiers was vague,
personal, and futile. His ambition for leadership, if it existed, was
subordinate to his ambition to be the saviour of his people and of their
democratic experiment, and he had no comprehension of those functions of
leadership by which it can co-ordinate detail and impose a plan of
action. Robespierre, therefore, in every crisis of the last year we are
about to study, yielded to his colleagues, never impressed them and
never led them, and yet (it was the irony of his fate) was imagined by
his fellow countrymen and by the warring Governments of Europe to be the
master of them all.
The first weeks after his appearance in the Committee of Public Safety
were the critical weeks of the whole revolutionary movement. The
despotic action of Paris (which I have concluded to be secretly
supported by the Committee)[5] had provoked insurrection upon all sides
in the provinces. Normandy had protested, and on the 13th of July a
Norman girl stabbed Marat to death. Lyons, as we have seen, had been
some weeks in revolt; Marseilles had rebelled in the first week of June,
Bordeaux and the whole department of the Gironde had of course risen,
for their men were at stake. Later Toulon, the great naval depot of
France, revolted: a reactionary municipal provincial Government was
formed in that port, the little boy imprisoned in the Temple, heir to
the kingdom, was proclaimed under the title of Louis XVII, and before
the end of August the English and Spanish fleets had been admitted into
the harbour and an excellent foreign garrison was defending the town
against the national Government.
Meanwhile the Allies upon the Belgian frontier were doing what they
could, taking fortress after fortress, and while Mayence was falling on
the Rhine, Valenciennes and Condé were capitulating on the north-eastern
border, and a portion of the Allied Army was marching to besiege
Dunquerque. The insurrection in Vendée, which had broken out in the
early part of the year, though checked by the resistance of Nantes, was
still successful in the field.
It was in the month of August that a successful effort was made. Carnot,
who soon proved the military genius of the Revolution, entered the
Committee of Public Safety. On the 23rd of the month a true levy, very
different from the futile and insufficiently applied attempt of the
spring, was forced upon the nation by a vote in Parliament. It was a
levy of men, vehicles, animals and provision, and soon furnished
something not far short of half a million soldiers. With September the
tide turned, the first victory in this crisis of the struggle,
Hoondschoote, relieved Dunquerque in the early days of September. By
mid-October a second and decisive victory, that of Wattignies, relieved
Maubeuge. Lyons had been taken, Normandy was pacified long before; by
the end of the year Toulon was reoccupied, and at the same time the last
cohesive force of the Vendeans destroyed.
But meanwhile the crisis had had a double effect, moral and material.
The moral effect had been a sort of national madness in which the most
extreme measures were proposed and many of them carried through with
what one may call a creative audacity. The calendar itself was changed,
the week itself abolished, the months re-named and re-adjusted. Such an
act sufficiently symbolises the mental attitude of the Revolutionaries.
They were determined upon a new earth.
There went with this the last and most violent attack upon what was
believed to be the last remnants of Catholicism in the country, a
hideous persecution of the priesthood, in which an uncounted number of
priests died under the rigours of transportation or of violence. The
reprisals against the rebels varied from severity of the most awful kind
to cruelty that was clearly insane, and of which the worst examples took
place at Arras and at Nantes.
In all this turmoil the governing centre of the country, the Committee
of Public Safety, not only kept its head but used the enormous forces of
the storm for the purposes of achieving military success, under that
system known as “the Terror,” which was for them no more than martial
law, and an engine of their despotic control. Of the two thousand and
more that passed before the revolutionary tribunal and were executed in
Paris, the large majority were those whom the Committee of Public Safety
judged to be obstacles to their military policy; and most were men or
women who had broken some specific part of the martial code which the
Government had laid down. Some were generals who had failed or were
suspected of treason; and some, among the most conspicuous, were
politicians who had attempted to check so absolute a method of
conducting the war.
Of these the greatest was Danton. Before the end of 1793 he began to
protest against the system of the Terror; he believed, perhaps, that the
country was now safe in the military sense and needed such rigours no
more. But the Committee disagreed, and were evidence available we should
perceive that Carnot in particular determined that such opposition must
cease. Danton and his colleagues--including Desmoulins, the journalist
of the Revolution and the chief publicist who promoted the days of July
1789--were executed in the first week of April 1794.
Parallel to this action on the part of the Committee was their sudden
attack upon men of the other extreme: the men whose violence, excessive
even for that time, threatened to provoke reaction. Hébert was the chief
of these, the spokesman of the Commune of Paris; and he also perished.
Meanwhile the Committee had permitted other persecutions and other
deaths, notably that of the Queen. A sane policy would have demanded
that she should be kept a hostage: she was sacrificed to the desire for
vengeance, and her head fell on the same day on which the decisive
battle of Wattignies was won. Later the King’s sister, Madame Elisabeth,
was sacrificed to the same passions, and with her must be counted a
certain proportion of the victims whose destruction could be no part of
the Committee’s scheme, and proceeded purely from the motives of an
ancient hatred, though in the case of many of these who were of
aristocratic birth or of influence through their wealth, it is not easy
to determine how far the possibility of their intrigue with the
foreigner may not have led them to the scaffold.
In the last four months of the period we are considering in this book,
through April, that is, after the execution of Danton, through May and
June and almost to the end of July, Robespierre appears with a
particular prominence. Fads or doctrines of his own are admitted upon
the Statute Book of the Revolution, notably his religious dogmas of a
personal God and of the immortality of the soul. Nay, a public solemnity
is arranged in honour of such matters, and he is the high priest
therein. The intensity of the idolatry he received was never greater;
the numbers that shared it were, perhaps, diminishing. It is certain
that he did not appreciate how far the supports of his great popularity
were failing. It is certain that he saw only the increasing enthusiasm
of his immediate followers. The Committee still used him as their
tool--notably for an increase of the Terror in June, but it is possible
that for the first time in all these months he began to attempt some
sort of authority within the Committee: we know, for instance, that he
quarrelled with Carnot, who was easily the strongest man therein.
In the past they had permitted him to indulge a private policy where it
did not interfere with the general military plan. He was largely
responsible, not through his own judgment but from his desire to voice
opinion, for the trial and execution of the Queen. He had temporised
when Danton was beginning his campaign against the Terror at the end of
1793, and it is an ineffaceable blot upon his memory and his justly
earned reputation for integrity and sincerity, that he first permitted
and then helped towards Danton’s execution. We may presume from the few
indications we have that he protested against it in the secret counsels
of the Committee, but he had yielded, and what is more, since Saint-Just
desired to be Danton’s accuser he had furnished Saint-Just with notes
against Danton. Though it was the Committee who were morally responsible
for the extreme extension of the Terror which proceeded during those
last few months, Robespierre had the unwisdom to act as their
instrument, to draft their last decrees, and, believing the Terror to be
popular, to support it in public. It was this that ruined him. The
extreme Terrorists, those who were not yet satiated with vengeance, and
who hated and feared a popular idol, determined to overthrow him.
The mass of those who might be the next victims and who, knowing nothing
of the secret councils of the Committee, imagined Robespierre to be what
he posed as being, the master of the Committee, were eager for his
removal. In his fictitious character as the supposed chief power in the
State, all the growing nausea against the Terror was directed against
his person.
Coincidently with such forces, the Committee, whom, relying upon his
public position, he had begun to interfere with, and probably to check
in their military action (he certainly had attempted unsuccessfully to
save certain lives against the decision of his colleagues), determined
to be rid of him. The crisis came in the fourth week of July: or as the
revolutionary calendar then went, in the second week of Thermidor. He
was howled down in the Parliament, an active and clever conspiracy had
organised all the latent forces of opposition to him; he still so
trusted in his popularity that the scene bewildered him, and he was
still so beloved and so ardently followed, that when at that same
sitting he was outlawed, his brother sacrificed himself to follow him.
Saint-Just was included in the sentence, and his strict friend Lebas
voluntarily accepted the same doom.
What followed was at first a confusion of authority; put under arrest,
the governor of the prison to which Robespierre was dispatched refused
to receive him. He and his sympathisers met in the Hôtel de Ville after
the fall of darkness, and an attempt was made to provoke an
insurrection. There are many and confused accounts of what immediately
followed at midnight, but two things are certain: the populace refused
to rise for Robespierre, and the Parliament, with the Committee at its
back, organised an armed force which easily had the better of the
incipient rebellion at the Hôtel de Ville. It is probable that
Robespierre’s signature was needed to the proclamation of insurrection:
it is certain that he did not complete it, and presumable that he would
not act against all his own theories of popular sovereignty and the
general will. As he sat there with the paper before him and his
signature still unfinished, the armed force of the Parliament burst into
the room, a lad of the name of Merda aimed a pistol from the door at
Robespierre, and shot him in the jaw. (The evidence in favour of this
version is conclusive.) Of his companions, some fled and were captured,
some killed themselves, most were arrested. The next day, the 10th
Thermidor, or 28th of July, 1794, at half-past seven in the evening,
Robespierre, with twenty-one others, was guillotined.
The irony of history would have it that the fall of this man, which was
chiefly due to his interference with the system of the Terror, broke all
the moral force upon which the Terror itself had resided; for men had
imagined that the Terror was his work, and that, he gone, no excuse was
left for it. A reaction began which makes of this date the true term in
that ascending series of revolutionary effort which had by then
discussed every aspect of democracy, succeeded in the military defence
of that experiment, and laid down, though so far in words only, the
basis of the modern State.