_Marat, Danton, Robespierre--Marat poniarded--Danton and
Robespierre become Rivals--Commune of Paris--their gross
Irreligion--Gobel--Goddess of Reason--Marriage reduced to a
Civil Contract--Views of Danton--and of Robespierre--Principal
Leaders of the Commune arrested--and Nineteen of them
executed--Danton arrested by the Influence of Robespierre--and,
along with Camille Desmoulins, Westermann, and La Croix, taken
before the Revolutionary Tribunal, condemned, and
executed--Decree issued, on the motion of Robespierre,
acknowledging a Supreme Being--Cécilée Regnault--Gradual Change
in the Public Mind--Robespierre becomes unpopular--Makes every
effort to retrieve his power--Stormy Debate in the
Convention--Collot D'Herbois, Tallien, &c., expelled from the
Jacobin Club at the instigation of Robespierre--Robespierre
denounced in the Convention on the 9th Thermidor, (27th July,
1794,) and, after furious struggles, arrested, along with his
brother, Couthon, and Saint Just--Henriot, Commandant of the
National Guard, arrested--Terrorists take refuge in the Hôtel de
Ville--Attempt their own lives--Robespierre wounds himself--but
lives, along with most of the others, long enough to be carried
to the Guillotine, and executed--His character--Struggles that
followed his Fate--Final Destruction of the Jacobinical
System--and return of Tranquillity--Singular colour given to
Society in Paris--Ball of the Victims._
The reader need not be reminded, that the three distinguished champions
who assumed the front in the Jacobin ranks, were Marat, Danton, and
Robespierre. The first was poniarded by Charlotte Corday[452] an
enthusiastic young person, who had nourished, in a feeling betwixt
lunacy and heroism, the ambition of ridding the world of a tyrant.[453]
Danton and Robespierre, reduced to a Duumvirate, might have divided the
power betwixt them. But Danton, far the more able and powerful-minded
man, could not resist temptations to plunder and to revel; and
Robespierre, who took care to preserve proof of his rival's peculations,
a crime of a peculiarly unpopular character, and from which he seemed to
keep his own hands pure, possessed thereby the power of ruining him
whenever he should find it convenient. Danton married a beautiful woman,
became a candidate for domestic happiness, withdrew himself for some
time from state affairs, and quitted the stern and menacing attitude
which he had presented to the public during the earlier stages of the
Revolution. Still his ascendency, especially in the Club of Cordeliers,
was formidable enough to command Robespierre's constant attention, and
keep awake his envy, which was like the worm that dieth not, though it
did not draw down any indication of his immediate and active vengeance.
A power, kindred also in crime, but more within his reach for the
moment, was first to be demolished, ere Robespierre was to measure
strength with his great rival.
[Sidenote: COMMUNE OF PARIS.]
This third party consisted of those who had possessed themselves of
official situations in the Commune of Paris, whose civic authority, and
the implement which they commanded in the Revolutionary army, commanded
by Ronsin, gave them the power of marching, at a moment's warning, upon
the Convention, or even against the Jacobin Club. It is true, these men,
of whom Hébert, Chaumette, and others, were leaders, had never shown the
least diffidence of Robespierre, but, on the contrary, had used all
means to propitiate his favour. But the man whom a tyrant fears,
becomes, with little farther provocation, the object of his mortal
enmity. Robespierre watched, therefore, with vigilance, the occasion of
overreaching and destroying this party, whose power he dreaded; and,
singular to tell, he sought the means of accomplishing their ruin in the
very extravagance of their revolutionary zeal, which shortly before he
might have envied, as pushed farther than his own. But Robespierre did
not want sense; and he saw with pleasure Hébert, Chaumette, and their
followers, run into such inordinate extravagances, as he thought might
render his own interference desirable, even to those who most disliked
his principles, most abhorred the paths by which he had climbed to
power, and most feared the use which he made of it.
It was through the subject of religion that this means of ruining his
opponents, as he hoped, arose. A subject, which one would have thought
so indifferent to either, came to be on both sides the occasion of
quarrel between the Commune of Paris and the Jacobin leader. But there
is a fanaticism of atheism, as well as of superstitious belief; and a
philosopher can harbour and express as much malice against those who
persevere in believing what he is pleased to denounce as unworthy of
credence, as an ignorant and bigoted priest can bear against a man who
cannot yield faith to dogmata which he thinks insufficiently proved.
Accordingly, the throne being wholly annihilated, it appeared to the
philosophers of the school of Hébert,[454] that, in totally destroying
such vestiges of religion and public worship as were still retained by
the people of France, there was room for a splendid triumph of liberal
opinions. It was not enough, they said, for a regenerate nation to have
dethroned earthly kings, unless she stretched out the arm of defiance
towards those powers which superstition had represented as reigning over
boundless space.[455]
An unhappy man, named Gobel, constitutional bishop of Paris, was brought
forward to play the principal part in the most impudent and scandalous
farce ever acted in the face of a national representation.
It is said that the leaders of the scene had some difficulty in inducing
the bishop to comply with the task assigned him; which, after all, he
executed, not without present tears and subsequent remorse.[456] But he
did play the part prescribed. He was brought forward in full procession,
[Nov. 7,] to declare to the Convention, that the religion which he had
taught so many years, was, in every respect, a piece of priestcraft,
which had no foundation either in history or sacred truth. He disowned,
in solemn and explicit terms, the existence of the Deity to whose
worship he had been consecrated, and devoted himself in future to the
homage of Liberty, Equality, Virtue, and Morality. He then laid on the
table his Episcopal decorations, and received a fraternal embrace from
the president of the Convention.[457] Several apostate priests followed
the example of this prelate.[458]
The gold and silver plate of the churches was seized upon and
desecrated; processions entered the Convention, travestied in priestly
garments, and singing the most profane hymns; while many of the chalices
and sacred vessels were applied by Chaumette and Hébert to the
celebration of their own impious orgies. The world, for the first time,
heard an assembly of men, born and educated in civilisation, and
assuming the right to govern one of the finest of the European nations,
uplift their united voice to deny the most solemn truth which man's soul
receives, and renounce unanimously the belief and worship of a Deity.
For a short time, the same mad profanity continued to be acted upon.
[Sidenote: GODDESS OF REASON.]
One of the ceremonies of this insane time stands unrivalled for
absurdity, combined with impiety. The doors of the Convention [Nov. 10]
were thrown open to a band of musicians; preceded by whom, the members
of the municipal body entered in solemn procession, singing a hymn in
praise of liberty, and escorting, as the object of their future worship,
a veiled female, whom they termed the Goddess of Reason. Being brought
within the bar, she was unveiled with great form, and placed on the
right hand of the president; when she was generally recognised as a
dancing-girl of the Opera,[459] with whose charms most of the persons
present were acquainted from her appearance on the stage, while the
experience of individuals was farther extended. To this person, as the
fittest representative of that Reason whom they worshipped, the National
Convention of France rendered public homage.[460]
This impious and ridiculous mummery had a certain fashion; and the
installation of the Goddess of Reason was renewed and imitated
throughout the nation, in such places where the inhabitants desired to
show themselves equal to all the heights of the Revolution. The churches
were, in most districts of France, closed against priests and
worshippers--the bells were broken and cast into cannon--the whole
ecclesiastical establishment destroyed--and the Republican inscription
over the cemeteries, declaring Death to be perpetual Sleep,[461]
announced to those who lived under that dominion, that they were to hope
no redress even in the next world.
Intimately connected with these laws affecting religion, was that which
reduced the union of marriage, the most sacred engagement which human
beings can form, and the permanence of which leads most strongly to the
consolidation of society, to the state of a mere civil contract of a
transitory character, which any two persons might engage in, and cast
loose at pleasure, when their taste was changed, or their appetite
gratified.[462] If fiends had set themselves to work to discover a mode
of most effectually destroying whatever is venerable, graceful, or
permanent in domestic life, and of obtaining, at the same time, an
assurance that the mischief which it was their object to create should
be perpetuated from one generation to another, they could not have
invented a more effectual plan than the degradation of marriage into a
state of mere occasional cohabitation, or licensed concubinage. Sophie
Arnould,[463] an actress famous for the witty things she said,
described the Republican marriage as "the Sacrament of Adultery."
These anti-religious and anti-social regulations did not answer the
purpose of the frantic and inconsiderate zealots, by whom they had been
urged forward. Hébert and Chaumette had outrun the spirit of the time,
evil as that was, and had contrived to get beyond the sympathy even of
those, who, at heart as vicious and criminal as they, had still the
sagacity to fear, or the taste to be disgusted with, this overstrained
tone of outrageous impiety. Perhaps they might have other motives for
condemning so gross a display of irreligion. The most guilty of men are
not desirous, generally speaking, totally to disbelieve and abandon all
doctrines of religious faith. They cannot, if they would, prevent
themselves from apprehending a future state of retribution; and little
effect as such feeble glimmering of belief may have on their lives, they
will not, in general, willingly throw away the slight chance, that it
may be possible on some occasion to reconcile themselves to the Church
or to the Deity. This hope, even to those on whom it has no salutary
influence, resembles the confidence given to a sailor during a gale of
wind, by his knowing that there is a port under his lee. His purpose may
be never to run for the haven, or he may judge there is great
improbability that by doing so he should reach it in safety; yet still,
such being the case, he would esteem himself but little indebted to any
one who should blot the harbour of refuge out of the chart. To all
those, who, in various degrees, received and believed the great truths
of religion, on which those of morality are dependent, the professors of
those wild absurdities became objects of contempt, dislike, hatred, and
punishment.
Danton regarded the proceedings of Hébert and his philosophers of the
Commune with scorn and disgust. However wicked he had shown himself, he
was too wise and too proud to approve of such impolitic and senseless
folly. Besides, this perpetual undermining whatever remained of social
institutions, prevented any stop being put to the revolutionary
movements, which Danton, having placed his party at the head of affairs,
and himself nearly as high as he could promise to climb, was now
desirous should be done.
[Sidenote: ROBESPIERRE.]
Robespierre looked on these extravagant proceedings with a different and
more watchful eye. He saw what Hébert and his associates had lost in
popularity, by affecting the doctrines of atheism and utter profaneness;
and he imagined a plan, first, for destroying these blasphemers, by the
general consent of the nation, as noxious animals, and then of
enlarging, and, as it were, sanctifying his own power, by once more
connecting a spirit of devotion of some modified kind or other with the
revolutionary form of government, of which he desired to continue the
head.
It has even been supposed, that Robespierre's extravagant success in
rising so much above all human expectation, had induced him to
entertain some thoughts of acting the part of a new Mahomet, in bringing
back religious opinion into France, under his own direct auspices. He is
said to have countenanced in secret the extravagances of a female called
Catherine Theos, or Theost,[464] an enthusiastic devotee, whose
doctrines leaned to Quietism. She was a kind of Joanna Southcote,[465]
and the Aaron of her sect was Dom Gerle, formerly a Carthusian monk, and
remarkable for the motion he made in the first National Assembly, that
the Catholic religion should be recognised as that of France.[466] Since
that time he had become entirely deranged. A few visionaries of both
sexes attended secret and nightly meetings, in which Theos and Dom
Gerle[467] presided. Robespierre was recognised by them as one of the
elect, and is said to have favoured their superstitious doctrines. But,
whether the dictator saw in them any thing more than tools, which might
be applied to his own purpose, there seems no positive authority to
decide. At any rate, whatever religious opinions he might have imbibed
himself, or have become desirous of infusing into the state, they were
not such as were qualified to modify either his ambition, his jealousy,
or his love of blood.
The power of Hébert, Chaumette, and of the Commune of Paris, was now
ripe for destruction. Ronsin, with the other armed satellites of the
revolutionary army, bullied indeed, and spoke about taking the part of
the magistracy of Paris against the Convention; but though they had the
master and active ruffians still at their service, they could no longer
command the long sable columns of pikes, which used to follow and back
them, and without whose aid they feared they might not be found equal in
number to face the National Guard. So early as 27th December, 1793, we
find Chaumette[468] expressing himself to the Commune, as one who had
fallen on evil times and evil days. He brought forward evidence to show
that it was not he who had conducted the installation of the Goddess of
Reason in his native city of Nevers; and he complains heavily of his
lot, that the halls were crowded with women demanding the liberty of
their husbands, and complaining of the conduct of the Revolutionary
societies. It was plain, that a change was taking place in the political
atmosphere, when Chaumette was obliged to vindicate himself from the
impiety which used to be his boast, and was subjected, besides, to
female reproach for his republican zeal, in imprisoning and destroying a
few thousand suspected persons.
The spirit of reaction increased, and was strengthened by Robespierre's
influence now thrown into the scale against the Commune. The principal
leaders in the Commune, many of whom seem to have been foreigners, and
among the rest the celebrated Anacharsis Clootz, were [22d March]
arrested.
The case of these men was singular, and would have been worthy of pity
had it applied to any but such worthless wretches. They were accused of
almost every species of crime, which seemed such in the eyes of a
Sans-Culotte. Much there was which could be only understood
metaphysically; much there was of literal falsehood; but little or
nothing like a distinct or well-grounded accusation of a specific
criminal fact. The charge bore, that they were associates of Pitt and
Cobourg, and had combined against the sovereignty of the people--loaded
them with the intention of starving thereby Paris--with that of
ridiculing the Convention, by a set of puppets dressed up to imitate
that scarce less passive assembly--and much more to the same purpose,
consisting of allegations that were totally unimportant, or totally
unproved. But nothing was said of their rivalry to Robespierre, which
was the true cause of their trial, and as little of their revolutionary
murders, being the ground on which they really deserved their fate.
Something was talked of pillage, at which Ronsin, the commandant of the
revolutionary army, lost all patience. "Do they talk to me of
pilfering?" he says. "Dare they accuse such a man as I am of a theft of
bed and body linen? Do they bring against me a charge of petty
larceny--against _me_, who have had all their throats at my
disposal?"[469]
The accused persons were convicted and executed, [23d March,] to the
number of nineteen.[470] From that time the city of Paris lost the means
of being so pre-eminent in the affairs of France, as her Commune had
formerly rendered her. The power of the magistracy was much broken by
the reduction of the revolution army, which the Convention dissolved,
as levied upon false principles, and as being rather a metropolitan than
a national force, and one which was easily applied to serve the purposes
of a party.
[Sidenote: DANTON ARRESTED.]
The Hébertists being removed, Robespierre had yet to combat and defeat a
more formidable adversary. The late conspirators had held associations
with the Club of Cordeliers, with which Danton was supposed to have
particular relations, but they had not experienced his support, which in
policy he ought to have extended to them. He had begun to separate his
party and his views too distinctly from his old friends and old
proceedings. He imagined, falsely as it proved, that his bark could sail
as triumphantly upon waves composed only of water, as on those of blood.
He and others seem to have been seized with a loathing against these
continued acts of cruelty, as if they had been gorged and nauseated by
the constant repetition. Danton spoke of mercy and pardon; and his
partisan, Camille Desmoulins, in a very ingenious parody upon
Tacitus,[471] drew a comparison between the tyrants and informers of the
French Jacobin government, and those of the Roman Imperial Court. The
parallels were most ably drawn, and Robespierre and his agents might
read their own characters in those of the most odious wretches of that
odious time. From these aggressions Danton seemed to meditate the part
which Tallien afterwards adopted, of destroying Robespierre and his
power, and substituting a mode of government which should show some
regard at least to life and to property. But he was too late in making
his movement; Robespierre was beforehand with him; and, on the morning
of the 31st of March, the Parisians and the members of the Convention
hardly dared whisper to each other, that Danton, whose name had been as
formidable as the sound of the tocsin, had been arrested like any poor
ex-noble, and was in the hands of the fatal lictors.
There was no end of exclamation and wonder; for Danton was the great
apostle, the very Mahomet of Jacobinism. His gigantic stature, his huge
and ferocious physiognomy, his voice, which struck terror in its notes
of distant thunder, and the energies of talent and vehemence mingled,
which supplied that voice with language worthy of its deep tones, were
such as became the prophet of that horrible and fearful sect. Marat was
a madman, raised into consequence only by circumstances,--Robespierre a
cold, creeping, calculating hypocrite, whose malignity resembled that of
a paltry and second-rate fiend,--but Danton was a character for
Shakspeare or Schiller to have drawn in all its broad lights and shades;
or Bruce could have sketched from him a yet grander Ras Michael than he
of Tigré. His passions were a hurricane, which, furious, regardless,
and desolating in its course, had yet its intervals of sunshine and
repose. Neither good by nature, nor just by principle or political
calculation, men were often surprised at finding he still possessed some
feelings of generosity, and some tendency even towards magnanimity.
Early habits of profligate indulgence, the most complete stifler of
human virtue, and his implication at the beginning of his career with
the wretched faction of Orleans, made him, if not a worse certainly a
meaner villain than nature had designed him; for his pride must have
saved him from much, which he yielded to from the temptations of gross
indulgence, and from the sense of narrow circumstances. Still, when
Danton fell under Robespierre, it seemed as if the "mousing-owl" had
hawked at and struck an eagle, or at least a high-soaring vulture. His
avowed associates lamented him, of course; nay, Legendre and others, by
undertaking his defence in the Convention, and arrogating for him the
merit of those violent measures which had paved the way to the triumph
of Jacobinism, showed more consistency in their friendship than these
ferocious demagogues manifested on any other occasion.[472]
Danton, before his fall, seemed to have lost much of his sagacity as
well as energy. He had full warning of his danger from La Croix,
Westermann, and others, yet took no steps either for escape or defence,
though either seemed in his power.[473] Still, his courage was in no
degree abated, or his haughty spirit tamed; although he seemed to submit
passively to his fate, with the disheartening conviction, which often
unmans great criminals, that his hour was come.[474]
[Sidenote: DANTON'S TRIAL.]
Danton's process was, of course, a short one. He and his comrades,
Camille Desmoulins, Westermann, and La Croix,[475] were dragged before
the Revolutionary Tribunal--a singular accomplishment of the prophecy of
the Girondist, Boyer Fonfrède.[476] This man had exclaimed to Danton,
under whose auspices that engine of arbitrary power was established,
"You insist, then, upon erecting this arbitrary judgment-seat? Be it so;
and, like the tormenting engine devised by Phalaris, may it not fall to
consume its inventors?" As judges, witnesses, accusers, and guards,
Danton was now surrounded by those who had been too humble to aspire to
be companions of his atrocities, and held themselves sufficiently
honoured in becoming his agents. They looked on his unstooping pride and
unshaken courage, as timid spectators upon a lion in a cage, while they
still doubt the security of the bars, and have little confidence in
their own personal safety. He answered to the formal interrogatories
concerning his name and dwelling, "My dwelling will be soon with
annihilation--my name will live in the Pantheon of History."[477]
Camille Desmoulins,[478] Hérault Séchelles,[479] Fabre d'Eglantine,[480]
men of considerable literary talent, and amongst the few Jacobins who
had any real pretension to such accomplishments, shared his fate.
Westermann was also numbered with them, the same officer who directed
the attack on the palace of the Tuileries on the 10th August, and who
afterwards was distinguished by so many victories and defeats in La
Vendée, that he was called, from his activity, the scourge of that
district.[481]
Their accusation was, as in all such cases at the period, an olla
podrida, if we can be allowed the expression, in which every criminal
ingredient was mixed up; but so incoherently mingled and assembled
together, so inconsistent with each other, and so obscurely detailed in
the charge and in the proof, that it was plain that malignant falsehood
had made the gruel thick and slab. Had Danton been condemned for his
real crimes, the doom ought, in justice, to have involved judges,
jurors, witnesses, and most of the spectators in the court.
Robespierre became much alarmed for the issue of the trial. The
Convention showed reviving signs of spirit; and when a revolutionary
deputation demanded at the bar, "that death should be the order of the
day," and reminded them, that, "had they granted the moderate demand of
three hundred thousand heads, when requested by the philanthropic, and
now canonized Marat, they would have saved the Republic the wars of La
Vendée," they were received with discouraging murmurs. Tallien, the
president, informed them, "that not death, but justice, was the order of
the day;" and the petitioners, notwithstanding the patriotic turn of
their modest request, were driven from the bar with execrations.
[Sidenote: DANTON EXECUTED.]
This looked ill; but the power of Robespierre was still predominant with
the Revolutionary Tribunal, and after a gallant and unusually long
defence, (of which no notice was permitted to appear in the Moniteur,)
Danton[482] and his associates were condemned, and carried to instant
execution. They maintained their firmness, or rather hardenedness of
character, to the last.[483] The sufferers on this occasion were men
whose accomplishments and talents attracted a higher degree of sympathy
than that which had been given to the equally eloquent but less
successful Girondists. Even honest men looked on the fate of Danton with
some regret, as when a furious bull is slain with a slight blow by a
crafty Tauridor; and many men of good feelings had hoped, that the cause
of order and security might at least have been benefited in some degree,
by his obtaining the victory in a struggle with Robespierre. Those, on
the other hand, who followed the fortunes of the latter, conceived his
power had been rendered permanent by the overthrow of his last and most
formidable rival, and exulted in proportion. Both were deceived in their
calculations. The predominance of such a man as Danton might possibly
have protracted the reign of Jacobinism, even by rendering it somewhat
more endurable; but the permanent, at least the ultimate, success of
Robespierre, was becoming more impossible, from the repeated decimations
to which his jealousy subjected his party. He was like the wild chief,
Lope d'Aguirre, whose story is so well told by Southey, who, descending
the great river Orellana with a party of Bucaniers, cut off one part of
his followers after another, in doubt of their fidelity, until the
remainder saw no chance for escaping a similar fate, unless by being
beforehand with their leader in murder.
Alluding to Robespierre's having been the instrument of his destruction,
Danton had himself exclaimed, "The cowardly poltroon! I am the only
person who could have commanded influence enough to save him."[484] And
the event showed that he spoke with the spirit of prophecy which the
approach of fate has been sometimes thought to confer.
In fact, Robespierre was much isolated by the destruction of the party
of Hébert, and still more by that of Danton and his followers. He had,
so to speak, scarped away the ground which he occupied, until he had
scarce left himself standing-room; and, detested by honest men, he had
alienated, by his successive cruelties, even the knaves who would
otherwise have adhered to him for their own safety. All now looked on
him with fear, and none dared hope at the hands of the Dictator a better
boon than that which is promised to OUTIS, that he should be the last
devoured.
It was at this period that Robespierre conceived the idea of reversing
the profanities of Chaumette, Hébert, and the atheists, by professing a
public belief in the existence of a Deity. This, he conceived, would at
once be a sacrifice to public opinion, and, as he hoped to manage it, a
new and potent spring, to be moved by his own finger. In a word, he
seems to have designed to unite, with his power in the state, the
character of High Pontiff of the new faith.
As the organ of the Committee of Public Safety, Robespierre, [May 7,] by
a speech of great length, and extremely dull, undertook the conversion
of the French nation from infidelity. Upon all such occasions he had
recourse to that gross flattery, which was his great, rarely-failing,
and almost sole receipt for popularity. He began by assuring them, that,
in her lights, and the progress of her improvement, France had preceded
the rest of Europe by a mark of at least two thousand years; and that,
existing among the ordinary nations of the world, she appeared to belong
to another race of beings. Still, he thought, some belief in a Deity
would do her no harm. Then he was again hurried away by his eloquence,
of which we cannot help giving a literal specimen, to show at how little
expense of sense, taste or talent, a man may be held an excellent
orator, and become dictator of a great nation:--
"Yes, the delicious land which we inhabit, and which Nature caresses
with so much predilection, is made to be the domain of liberty and of
happiness; and that people, at once so open to feeling and to generous
pride, are born for glory and for virtue. O my native country! if
fortune had caused my birth in some region remote from thy shores, I
would not the less have addressed constant prayers to Heaven in thy
behalf, and would have wept over the recital of thy combats and thy
virtues. My soul would have followed with restless ardour every change
in this eventful Revolution--I would have envied the lot of thy
natives--of thy representatives. But I am myself a native of France--I
am myself a representative. Intoxicating rapture!--O sublime people,
receive the sacrifice of my entire being! Happy is he who is born in the
midst of thee! More happy he who can lay down his life for thy
welfare!"[485]
[Sidenote: FESTIVAL OF THE SUPREME BEING.]
Such was the language which this great demagogue held to the "sublime
people" whose lives he disposed of at the rate of fifty per day, regular
task-work;[486] and who were so well protected in person and property,
that no man dared call his hat his own, or answer for ten minutes' space
for the security of the head that wore it. Much there was, also, about
the rashness of the worshippers of Reason, whose steps he accuses of
being too premature in her cause--much about England and Mr. Pitt, who,
he says, fasted on account of the destruction of the Catholic religion
in France, as they wore mourning for Capet and his wife. But the summary
of this extraordinary oration was a string of decrees, commencing with a
declaration that the Republic of France acknowledged the existence of a
Supreme Being, in the precise form in which the grand nation might have
recognised the government of a co-ordinate state. The other decrees
established the nature of the worship to be rendered to the Great Being
whom these frail atoms had restored to his place in their thoughts; and
this was to be expressed by dedicating a day in each decade to some
peculiar and established Virtue, with hymns and processions in due
honour of it, approaching as near to Paganism as could well be
accomplished. The last decree appointed a _fête_ to be given in honour
of the Supreme Being himself, as the nation might have celebrated by
public rejoicings a pacification with some neighbouring power.[487]
The speech was received with servile applause by the Convention.
Couthon, with affected enthusiasm, demanded that not only the speech
should be published in the usual form, by supplying each member with six
copies, but that the plan should be translated into all languages, and
dispersed through the universe.
The conducting of this heathen mummery, which was substituted for every
external sign of rational devotion, was intrusted to the genius of the
painter David; and had it not been that the daring blasphemy of the
purpose threw a chill upon the sense of ridicule, it was scarcely
matched as a masquerade, even by the memorable procession conducted by
the notorious Orator of the Human Race.[488] There was a general muster
of all Paris, [June 8,] divided into bands of young women and matrons,
and old men and youths, with oaken boughs and drawn swords, and all
other emblems appertaining to their different ages. They were preceded
by the representatives of the people, having their hands full of ears of
corn, and spices, and fruits; while Robespierre, their president, clad
in a sort of purple garment, moved apart and alone, and played the part
of Sovereign Pontiff.[489]
After marching up and down through the streets, to the sound of doggrel
hymns, the procession drew up in the gardens of the Tuileries, before
some fireworks which had been prepared, and Robespierre made a speech,
entirely addressed to the bystanders, without a word either of prayer or
invocation. His acknowledgment of a Divinity was, it seems, limited to a
mere admission in point of fact, and involved no worship of the Great
Being, whose existence he at length condescended to own. He had no
sooner made his offering, than fire was set to some figures dressed up
to resemble Atheism, Ambition, Egotism, and other evil principles. The
young men then brandished their weapons, the old patted them on the
head, the girls flung about their flowers, and the matrons flourished
aloft their children, all as it had been set down in David's programme.
And this scene of masking was to pass for the repentance of a great
people turning themselves again to the Deity, whose worship they had
forsaken, and whose being they had denied![490]
I will appeal--not to a sincere Christian--but to any philosopher
forming such idea of the nature of the Deity, as even mere unassisted
reason can attain to, whether there does not appear more impiety in
Robespierre's mode of acknowledging the Divinity, than in Hébert's
horrible avowal of direct Atheism?
The procession did not, in common phrase, _take_ with the people: it
produced no striking effect--awakened no deep feeling. By Catholics it
was regarded with horror, by wise men of every or no principle as
ridiculous; and there were politicians, who, under the disguise of this
religious ceremony, pretended to detect further and deeper schemes of
the dictator Robespierre. Even in the course of the procession, threats
and murmurs had reached his ears, which the impatient resentment of the
friends of Danton was unable to suppress;[491] and he saw plainly that
he must again betake himself to the task of murder, and dispose of
Tallien, Collot d'Herbois, and others, as he had done successively of
Hébert and Danton himself, or else his former victories would but lead
to his final ruin.
Meanwhile the despot, whose looks made even the democrats of The
Mountain tremble, when directed upon them, shrunk himself before the
apprehended presence of a young female. Cécile Regnault, a girl, and, as
it would seem, unarmed, came to his house and demanded to see
Robespierre. Her manner exciting some suspicion, she was seized upon by
the body-guard of Jacobins, who day and night watched the den of the
tyrant, amidst riot and blasphemy, while he endeavoured to sleep under
the security of their neighbourhood. When the young woman was brought
before the Revolutionary Tribunal, she would return no answer to the
questions respecting her purpose, excepting that she wished to see "what
a tyrant was like." She was condemned to the guillotine of course; and
about sixty persons were executed as associates of a conspiracy, which
was never proved, by deed or word, to have existed at all. The victims
were drawn at hazard out of the prisons, where most of them had been
confined for months previous to the arrest of Cécile Regnault, on whose
account they were represented as suffering.[492] Many have thought the
crime entirely imaginary, and only invented by Robespierre to represent
his person as endangered by the plots of the aristocracy, and attach to
himself a part at least of the consequence, which Marat had acquired by
the act of Charlotte Corday.[493]
A few weeks brought on a sterner encounter, than that of the supposed
female assassin. The Terrorists were divided among themselves. The
chosen and ancient bands of the 10th August, 2d September, 31st May, and
other remarkable periods of the Revolution, continued attached to the
Jacobins, and the majority of the Jacobin Club adhered to Robespierre;
it was there his strength consisted. On the other hand, Tallien, Barras,
Legendre, Fouché, and other of the Mountain party, remembered Danton,
and feared for a similar fate. The Convention at large were sure to
embrace any course which promised to free them from their present
thraldom.
[Sidenote: CHANGE IN THE PUBLIC MIND.]
The people themselves were beginning to be less passive. They no longer
saw the train of victims pass daily to the guillotine in the Place de la
Révolution, with stupid wonder, or overwhelming fear, but, on the
contrary, with the sullenness of manifest resentment, that waited but an
opportunity to display itself. The citizens in the Rue St. Honoré shut
up their shops at the hours when the fatal tumbrils passed to the scene
of death, and that whole quarter of the city was covered with gloom.
These ominous feelings were observed, and the fatal engine was removed
to a more obscure situation at the Barrièr de la Trône, near the
Fauxbourg Saint Antoine, to the inhabitants of which it was thought a
daily spectacle of this nature must be an interesting relief from
labour. But even the people of that turbulent suburb had lost some of
their Republican zeal--the men's feelings were altered. They saw,
indeed, blood stream in such quantities, that it was necessary to make
an artificial conduit to carry it off; but they did not feel that they,
or those belonging to them, received any advantages from the number of
victims daily immolated, as they were assured, in their behalf. The
constant effusion of blood, without plunder or license to give it zest,
disgusted them, as it would have disgusted all but literal cannibals, to
whose sustenance, indeed, the Revolutionary Tribunal would have
contributed plentifully.[494]
[Sidenote: ROBESPIERRE UNPOPULAR.]
Robespierre saw all this increasing unpopularity with much anxiety. He
plainly perceived that, strong as its impulse was, the stimulus of
terror began to lose its effect on the popular mind; and he resolved to
give it novelty, not by changing the character of his system, but by
varying the mode of its application. Hitherto, men had only been
executed for political crimes, although the circle had been so vaguely
drawn, and capable of such extension when desired, that the law
regarding suspected persons was alone capable of desolating a whole
country. But if the penalty of death were to be inflicted for religious
and moral delinquencies, as well as for crimes directed against the
state, it would at once throw the lives of thousands at his disposal,
upon whom he could have no ready hold on political motives, and might
support, at the same time, his newly assumed character as a reformer of
manners. He would also thus escape the disagreeable and embarrassing
necessity, of drawing lines of distinction betwixt his own conduct and
that of the old friends whom he found it convenient to sacrifice. He
could not say he was less a murderer than the rest of his associates,
but he might safely plead more external decency of morals. His own
manners had always been reserved and austere; and what a triumph would
it have been, had the laws permitted him the benefit of slaying Danton,
not under that political character which could hardly be distinguished
from his own, but on account of the gross peculation and debauchery,
which none could impute to the austere and incorruptible Robespierre.
His subordinate agents began already to point to a reformation of
manners. Payan, who succeeded Hébert in the important station of
Procureur to the Commune of the metropolis, had already adopted a very
different line from his predecessor, whose style derived energy by
printing at full length the foulest oaths, and most beastly expressions,
used by the refuse of the people. Payan, on the contrary, in direct
opposition to Père Duchêsne, is found gravely advising with the Commune
of Paris, on a plan of preventing the exposing licentious prints and
works to sale, to the evident danger of corrupting the rising
generation.
There exists also a curious address from the Convention, which tends to
evince a similar purpose in the framer, Robespierre. The guilt of
profane swearing, and of introducing the sacred name into ordinary
speech, as an unmeaning and blasphemous expletive, is severely censured.
The using indecent and vicious expressions in common discourse is also
touched upon; but as this unbounded energy of speech had been so very
lately one of the most accredited marks of a true Sans-Culotte, the
legislators were compelled to qualify their censure by admitting, that,
at the commencement of the Revolution, the vulgar mode of speaking had
been generally adopted by patriots, in order to destroy the jargon
employed by the privileged classes, and to _popularize_, as it was
expressed, the general language of society. But these ends being
effected, the speech of Republicans ought, it is said, to be simple,
manly, and concise, but, at the same time, free from coarseness and
violence.[495]
From these indications, and the tenor of a decree to be hereafter
quoted, it seems plain, that Robespierre was about to affect a new
character, not, perhaps, without the hope of finding a Puritanic party
in France, as favourable to his ambitious views as that of the
Independents was to Cromwell. He might then have added the word _virtue_
to liberty and equality, which formed the national programme, and,
doubtless, would have made it the pretext of committing additional
crimes. The decree which we allude to was brought forward [June 8] by
the philanthropic Couthon, who, with his kindness of manner, rendered
more impressive by a silver-toned voice, and an affectation of extreme
gentleness, tendered a law, extending the powers of the Revolutionary
Tribunal, and the penalty of death, not only to all sorts of persons who
should in any manner of way neglect their duty to the Republic, or
assist her enemies, but to the following additional classes: All who
should have deceived the people or their representatives--all who should
have sought to inspire discouragement into good citizens, or to favour
the undertakings of tyrants--all who should spread false news--all who
should seek to lead astray the public opinion, and to prevent the
instruction of the people, or to debauch manners, and corrupt the public
conscience; or who should diminish the purity of revolutionary
principles by counter-revolutionary works, &c. &c. &c.[496]
It is evident, that compared with a law couched in terms so vague and
general, so obscure and indefinite, the description of crimes concerning
suspected persons was broad sunshine, that there was no Frenchman living
who might not be brought within the danger of the decree, under one or
other of those sweeping clauses; that a loose or careless expression, or
the repetition of an inaccurate article of news, might be founded on as
corrupting the public conscience, or misleading the public opinion; in
short, that the slightest indulgence in the most ordinary functions of
speech might be brought under this comprehensive edict, and so cost the
speaker his life.
The decree sounded like a death-knell in the ears of the Convention. All
were made sensible that another decimation of the legislative body
approached; and beheld with terror, that no provision was made in the
proposed law for respecting the personal inviolability of the deputies,
but that the obnoxious members of the Convention, without costing
Robespierre even the formality of asking a decree from their complaisant
brethren, might be transferred, like any ordinary individuals, to the
butchery of the Revolutionary Tribunal, not only by the medium of either
of the committees, but at the instance of the public prosecutor, or even
of any of their own brethren of the representative body, who were acting
under a commission. Ruamps, one of the deputies, exclaimed, in accents
of despair, that "if this decree were resolved upon, the friends of
liberty had no other course left than to blow their own brains out."
The law passed for the night, in spite of all opposition; but the
terrified deputies returned to the attack next day. The measure was
again brought into debate, and the question of privileges was evasively
provided for. At a third sitting the theme was renewed; and, after much
violence, the fatal decree was carried, without any of the clogs which
had offended Robespierre, and he attained possession of the fatal
weapon, such as he had originally forged it.[497]
From this moment there was mortal though secret war betwixt Robespierre
and the most distinguished members of the Assembly, particularly those
who had sate with him on the celebrated Mountain, and shared all the
atrocities of Jacobinism. Collot d'Herbois, the demolisher of Lyons, and
regenerator of Ville Affranchie, threw his weight into the scale against
his master; and several other members of both committees, which were
Robespierre's own organs, began secretly to think on means of screening
themselves from a power, which, like the huge Anaconda, enveloped in its
coils, and then crushed and swallowed, whatever came in contact with it.
The private progress of the schism cannot be traced; but it is said that
the dictator found himself in a minority in the Committee of Public
Safety, when he demanded the head of Fouché, whom he had accused as a
Dantonist in the Convention and the Jacobin Club. It is certain he had
not attended the meeting of the Committee for two or three weeks before
his fall, leaving his interest there to be managed by Couthon and Saint
Just.
Feeling himself thus placed in the lists against his ancient friends the
Terrorists, the astucious tyrant endeavoured to acquire allies among the
remains of the Girondists, who had been spared in contempt more than
clemency, and permitted to hide themselves among the neutral party who
occupied The Plain, and who gave generally their votes on the prudential
system of adhering to the stronger side.
Finding little countenance from this timid and long-neglected part of
the legislative body, Robespierre returned to his more steady supporters
in the Jacobin Club. Here he retained his supremacy, and was heard with
enthusiastic applause; while he intimated to them the defection of
certain members of the legislature from the true revolutionary course;
complained of the inactivity and lukewarmness of the Committees of
Public Safety and Public Security, and described himself as a persecuted
patriot, almost the solitary supporter of the cause of his country, and
exposed for that reason to the blows of a thousand assassins. "All
patriots," exclaimed Couthon, "are brothers and friends! For my part I
invoke on myself the poniards destined against Robespierre." "So do we
all!" exclaimed the meeting unanimously. Thus encouraged, Robespierre
urged a purification of the Society, directing his accusations against
Fouché and other members of The Mountain; and he received the
encouragement he desired.[498]
He next ascertained his strength among the Judges of the Revolutionary
Tribunal, and his willing agents among the reformed Commune of Paris,
which, after the fall of Hébert and Chaumette, he had taken care to
occupy with his most devoted friends. But still he knew that, in the
storm which was about to arise, these out-of-door demagogues were but a
sort of tritons of the minnows, compared to Tallien, Fouché, Barras,
Collot d'Herbois, Billaud-Varennes, and other deputies of distinguished
powers, accustomed to make their voices heard and obeyed amid all the
roar of revolutionary tempest. He measured and remeasured his force with
theirs; and for more than six weeks avoided the combat, yet without
making any overtures for reconciliation, in which, indeed, neither party
would probably have trusted the other.
Meantime, the dictator's enemies had also their own ground on which they
could engage advantageously in these skirmishes, which were to serve as
preludes to the main and fatal conflict. Vadier, on the part of the
Committee of Public Safety, laid before the Convention, in a tone of
bitter satirical ridicule, the history of the mystical meetings and
formation of a religious sect under Catherine Theos, whose pretensions
have been already hinted at. No mention was indeed made of Robespierre,
or of the countenance he was supposed to have given to these fanatical
intriguers. But the fact of his having done so was well known; and the
shafts of Vadier were aimed with such malignant dexterity, that while
they seemed only directed against the mystics of whom he spoke, they
galled to the quick the high pontiff, who had so lately conducted the
new and singular system of worship which his influence had been employed
to ingraft upon the genuine atheism natural to Jacobinism.[499]
Robespierre felt he could not remain long in this situation--that there
were no means of securing himself where he stood--that he must climb
higher, or fall--and that every moment in which he supported insults and
endured menaces without making his vengeance felt, brought with it a
diminution of his power. He seems to have hesitated between combat and
flight. Among his papers, according to the report of Cortois who
examined them, was found an obscure intimation, that he had acquired a
competent property, and entertained thoughts of retiring at the close of
his horrible career, after the example of the celebrated Sylla. It was a
letter from some unknown confidant, unsigned and undated, containing the
following singular passage:--"You must employ all your dexterity to
escape from the scene on which you are now once more to appear, in order
to leave it for ever. Your having attained the president's chair will be
but one step to the guillotine, through a rabble who will spit upon you
as you pass, as they did upon Egalité. Since you have collected a
treasure sufficient to maintain you for a long time, as well as those
for whom you have made provision, I will expect you with anxiety, that
we may enjoy a hearty laugh together at the expense of a nation as
credulous as it is greedy of novelty." If, however, he had really formed
such a plan, which would not have been inconsistent with his base
spirit, the means of accomplishing it were probably never
perfected.[500]
At length his fate urged him on to the encounter. Robespierre descended
[July 26] to the Convention, where he had of late but rarely appeared,
like the far nobler Dictator of Rome; and in his case also, a band of
senators were ready to poniard the tyrant on the spot, had they not been
afraid of the popularity he was supposed to enjoy, and which they feared
might render them instant victims to the revenge of the Jacobins. The
speech which Robespierre addressed to the Convention was as menacing as
the first distant rustle of the hurricane, and dark and lurid as the
eclipse which announces its approach. Anxious murmurs had been heard
among the populace who filled the tribunes, or crowded the entrances of
the hall of the Convention, indicating that a second 31st of May (being
the day on which the Jacobins proscribed the Girondists) was about to
witness a similar operation.
The first theme of the gloomy orator was the display of his own virtues
and his services as a patriot, distinguishing as enemies to their
country all whose opinions were contrary to his own. He then reviewed
successively the various departments of the government, and loaded them
in turn with censure and contempt. He declaimed against the supineness
of the Committees of Public Safety and Public Security, as if the
guillotine had never been in exercise; and he accused the committee of
finance of having _counter-revolutionized_ the revenues of the Republic.
He enlarged with no less bitterness on withdrawing the artillerymen
(always violent Jacobins) from Paris, and on the mode of management
adopted in the conquered countries of Belgium. It seemed as if he wished
to collect within the same lists all the functionaries of the state, and
in the same breath to utter defiance to them all.[501]
[Sidenote: ROBESPIERRE DENOUNCED.]
The usual honorary motion was made to print the discourse; but then the
storm of opposition broke forth, and many speakers vociferously
demanded, that before so far adopting the grave inculpations which it
contained, the discourse should be referred to the two committees.
Robespierre, in his turn, exclaimed, that this was subjecting his speech
to the partial criticism and revision of the very parties whom he had
accused. Exculpations and defences were heard on all sides against the
charges which had been thus sweepingly brought forward; and there were
many deputies who complained, in no obscure terms, of individual
tyranny, and of a conspiracy on foot to outlaw and murder such part of
the Convention as might be disposed to offer resistance. Robespierre was
but feebly supported, save by Saint Just, Couthon, and by his own
brother. After a stormy debate, in which the Convention were alternately
swayed by their fear and their hatred of Robespierre, the discourse was
finally referred to the committees, instead of being printed; and the
haughty and sullen dictator saw, in the open slight thus put on his
measures and opinions, the sure mark of his approaching fall.
[Sidenote: ROBESPIERRE'S DEFENCE.]
He carried his complaints to the Jacobin Club, to repose, as he
expressed it, his patriotic sorrows in their virtuous bosoms, where
alone he hoped to find succour and sympathy. To this partial audience he
renewed, in a tone of yet greater audacity, the complaints with which he
had loaded every branch of the government, and the representative body
itself. He reminded those around him of various heroic eras, when their
presence and their pikes had decided the votes of the trembling
deputies. He reminded them of their pristine actions of revolutionary
vigour--asked them if they had forgot the road to the Convention,[502]
and concluded by pathetically assuring them, that if they forsook him,
"he stood resigned to his fate; and they should behold with what courage
he would drink the fatal hemlock." The artist David caught him by the
hand as he closed, exclaiming, in rapture at his elocution, "I will
drink it with thee."[503]
The distinguished painter has been reproached, as having, on the
subsequent day, declined the pledge which he seemed so eagerly to
embrace. But there were many of his original opinion, at the time he
expressed it so boldly; and had Robespierre possessed either military
talents, or even decided courage, there was nothing to have prevented
him from placing himself that very night at the head of a desperate
insurrection of the Jacobins and their followers.
Payan, the successor of Hébert, actually proposed that the Jacobins
should instantly march against the two committees, which Robespierre
charged with being the focus of the anti-revolutionary machinations,
surprise their handful of guards, and stifle the evil with which the
state was menaced, even in the very cradle. This plan was deemed too
hazardous to be adopted, although it was one of those sudden and
master-strokes of policy which Machiavel would have recommended. The
fire of the Jacobins spent itself in tumult and threatening, in
expelling from the bosom of their society Collot d'Herbois, Tallien, and
about thirty other deputies of the Mountain party, whom they considered
as specially leagued to effect the downfall of Robespierre, and whom
they drove from their society with execrations and even blows.[504]
Collot d'Herbois, thus outraged, went straight from the meeting of the
Jacobins to the place where the Committee of Public Safety was still
sitting, in consultation on the report which they had to make to the
Convention the next day upon the speech of Robespierre. Saint Just, one
of their number, though warmly attached to the dictator, had been
intrusted by the committee with the delicate task of drawing up that
report. It was a step towards reconciliation; but the entrance of Collot
d'Herbois, frantic with the insults he had received, broke off all hope
of accommodation betwixt the friends of Danton and those of Robespierre.
D'Herbois exhausted himself in threats against Saint Just, Couthon, and
their master, Robespierre, and they parted on terms of mortal and avowed
enmity. Every exertion now was used by the associated conspirators
against the power of Robespierre, to collect and combine against him the
whole forces of the Convention, to alarm the deputies of The Plain with
fears for themselves, and to awaken the rage of the Mountaineers,
against whose throat the dictator now waved the sword, which their
shortsighted policy had placed in his hands. Lists of proscribed
deputies were handed around, said to have been copied from the tablets
of the dictator; genuine or false, they obtained universal credit and
currency; and those whose names stood on the fatal scrolls, engaged
themselves for protection in the league against their enemy. The opinion
that his fall could not be delayed now became general.
[Sidenote: THE NINTH THERMIDOR.]
This sentiment was so commonly entertained in Paris on the 9th
Thermidor, or 27th July, that a herd of about eighty victims, who were
in the act of being dragged to the guillotine, were nearly saved by
means of it. The people, in a generous burst of compassion, began to
gather in crowds, and interrupted the melancholy procession, as if the
power which presided over these hideous exhibitions had already been
deprived of energy. But the hour was not come. The vile Henriot,
commandant of the national guards, came up with fresh forces, and on the
day destined to be the last of his own life, proved the means of
carrying to execution this crowd of unhappy and doubtless innocent
persons.
On this eventful day, Robespierre arrived in the Convention, and beheld
The Mountain in close array and completely manned, while, as in the case
of Cataline, the bench on which he himself was accustomed to sit, seemed
purposely deserted. Saint Just, Couthon, Le Bas (his brother-in-law,)
and the younger Robespierre, were the only deputies of name who stood
prepared to support him. But could he make an effectual struggle, he
might depend upon the aid of the servile Barrère, a sort of Belial in
the Convention, the meanest, yet not the least able, amongst those
fallen spirits, who, with great adroitness and ingenuity, as well as wit
and eloquence, caught opportunities as they arose, and was eminently
dexterous in being always strong upon the strongest, and safe upon the
safest side. There was a tolerably numerous party ready, in times so
dangerous, to attach themselves to Barrère, as a leader who professed to
guide them to safety, if not to honour; and it was the existence of this
vacillating and uncertain body, whose ultimate motions could never be
calculated upon, which rendered it impossible to presage with assurance
the event of any debate in the Convention during this dangerous period.
Saint Just arose, in the name of the Committee of Public Safety, to
make, after his own manner, not theirs, a report on the discourse of
Robespierre on the previous evening. He had begun an harangue in the
tone of his patron, declaring that, were the tribune which he occupied
the Tarpeian rock itself, he would not the less, placed as he stood
there, discharge the duties of a patriot.--"I am about," he said, "to
lift the veil."--"I tear it asunder," said Tallien, interrupting him:
"the public interest is sacrificed by individuals, who come hither to
speak exclusively in their own name, and conduct themselves as superior
to the whole Convention." He forced Saint Just from the tribune, and a
violent debate ensued.
[Sidenote: ROBESPIERRE DENOUNCED.]
Billaud-Varennes called the attention of the Assembly to the sitting of
the Jacobin Club on the preceding evening. He declared the military
force of Paris was placed under the command of Henriot, a traitor and a
parricide, who was ready to march the soldiers whom he commanded against
the Convention. He denounced Robespierre himself as a second Cataline,
artful as well as ambitious, whose system it had been to nurse
jealousies and inflame dissensions in the Convention, so as to disunite
parties, and even individuals, from each other, attack them in detail,
and thus destroy those antagonists separately, upon whose combined and
united strength he dared not have looked.
The Convention echoed with applause every violent expression of the
orator, and when Robespierre sprung to the tribune, his voice was
drowned by a general shout of "Down with the tyrant!" Tallien moved the
denunciation of Robespierre, with the arrest of Henriot, his
staff-officers, and of others connected with the meditated violence on
the Convention. He had undertaken to lead the attack upon the tyrant, he
said, and to poniard him in the Convention itself, if the members did
not show courage enough to enforce the law against him. With these words
he brandished an unsheathed poniard, as if about to make his purpose
good. Robespierre still struggled hard to obtain audience, but the
tribune was adjudged to Barrère; and the part taken against the fallen
dictator by that versatile and self-interested statesman, was the most
absolute sign that his overthrow was irrecoverable. Torrents of
invective were now uttered from every quarter of the hall, against him
whose single word was wont to hush it into silence.
The scene was dreadful; yet not without its use to those who may be
disposed to look at it as an extraordinary crisis, in which human
passions were brought so singularly into collision. While the vaults of
the hall echoed with exclamations from those who had hitherto been the
accomplices, the flatterers, the followers, at least the timid and
overawed assentators to the dethroned demagogue--he himself, breathless,
foaming, exhausted, like the hunter of classical antiquity when on the
point of being overpowered and torn to pieces by his own hounds, tried
in vain to raise those screech-owl notes, by which the Convention had
formerly been terrified and put to silence. He appealed for a hearing
from the president of the assembly, to the various parties of which it
was composed. Rejected by the Mountaineers, his former associates, who
now headed the clamour against him, he applied to the Girondists, few
and feeble as they were, and to the more numerous but equally helpless
deputies of The Plain, with whom they sheltered. The former shook him
from them with disgust, the last with horror. It was in vain he reminded
individuals that he had spared their lives, while at his mercy. This
might have been applied to every member in the house; to every man in
France; for who was it during two years that had lived on other terms
than under Robespierre's permission? and deeply must he internally have
regretted the clemency, as he might term it, which had left so many with
ungashed throats to bay at him. But his agitated and repeated appeals
were repulsed by some with indignation, by others with sullen, or
embarrassed and timid silence.
A British historian must say, that even Robespierre ought to have been
heard in his defence; and that such calmness would have done honour to
the Convention, and dignified their final sentence of condemnation. As
it was, they no doubt treated the guilty individual according to his
deserts; but they fell short of that regularity and manly staidness of
conduct which was due to themselves and to the law, and which would have
given to the punishment of the demagogue the effect and weight of a
solemn and deliberate sentence, in place of its seeming the result of a
hasty and precipitate seizure of a temporary advantage.
Haste was, however, necessary, and must have appeared more so at such a
crisis than perhaps it really was. Much must be pardoned to the terrors
of the moment, the horrid character of the culprit, and the necessity of
hurrying to a decisive conclusion. We have been told that his last
audible words, contending against the exclamations of hundreds, and the
bell which the president[505] was ringing incessantly, and uttered in
the highest tones which despair could give to a voice naturally shrill
and discordant, dwelt long on the memory, and haunted the dreams, of
many who heard him:--"President of assassins," he screamed, "for the
last time I demand privilege of speech!"--After this exertion his breath
became short and faint; and while he still uttered broken murmurs and
hoarse ejaculations, a member of the Mountain[506] called out, that the
blood of Danton choked his voice.
The tumult was closed by a decree of arrest against Robespierre, his
brother, Couthon, and Saint Just; Le Bas was included on his own motion,
and indeed could scarce have escaped the fate of his brother-in-law,
though his conduct then, and subsequently, showed more energy than that
of the others. Couthon, hugging in his bosom the spaniel upon which he
was wont to exhaust the overflowing of his affected sensibility,
appealed to his decrepitude, and asked whether, maimed of proportion and
activity as he was, _he_ could be suspected of nourishing plans of
violence or ambition.--"Wretch," said Legendre, "thou hast the strength
of Hercules for the perpetration of crime." Dumas, President of the
Revolutionary Tribunal, with Henriot, commandant of the national guards,
and other satellites of Robespierre, were included in the doom of
arrest.[507]
The officers of the legislative body were ordered to lay hands on
Robespierre; but such was the terror of his name, that they hesitated
for some time to obey; and the reluctance of their own immediate
satellites afforded the Convention an indifferent omen of the respect
which was likely to be paid without doors to their decree against this
powerful demagogue. Subsequent events seemed for a while to confirm the
apprehensions thus excited.
The Convention had declared their sitting permanent, and had taken all
precautions for appealing for protection to the large mass of citizens,
who, wearied out by the Reign of Terror, were desirous to close it at
all hazards. They quickly had deputations from several of the
neighbouring sections, declaring their adherence to the national
representatives, in whose defence they were arming, and (many
undoubtedly prepared before-hand) were marching in all haste to the
protection of the Convention. But they heard also the less pleasing
tidings, that Henriot having effected the dispersion of those citizens
who had obstructed, as elsewhere mentioned, the execution of the eighty
condemned persons, and consummated that final act of murder, was
approaching the Tuileries, where they had held their sitting, with a
numerous staff, and such of the Jacobinical forces as could hastily be
collected.
Happily for the Convention, this commandant of the national guards, on
whose presence of mind and courage the fate of France perhaps for the
moment depended, was as stupid and cowardly as he was brutally
ferocious. He suffered himself, without resistance, to be arrested by a
few gendarmes, the immediate guards of the Convention, headed by two of
its members, who behaved in the emergency with equal prudence and
spirit.
But fortune, or the demon whom he had served, afforded Robespierre
another chance for safety, perhaps even for empire; for moments which a
man of self-possession might have employed for escape, one of desperate
courage might have used for victory, which, considering the divided and
extremely unsettled state of the capital, was likely to be gained by the
boldest competitor.
[Sidenote: TERRORISTS AT THE HOTEL DE VILLE.]
The arrested deputies had been carried from one prison to another, all
the jailors refusing to receive under their official charge Robespierre,
and those who had aided him in supplying their dark habitations with
such a tide of successive inhabitants. At length the prisoners were
secured in the office of the Committee of Public Safety. But by this
time all was in alarm amongst the Commune of Paris, where Fleuriot the
mayor, and Payan the successor of Hébert, convoked the civic body,
despatched municipal officers to raise the city and the Fauxbourgs in
their name, and caused the tocsin to be rung. Payan speedily assembled a
force sufficient to liberate Henriot, Robespierre, and the other
arrested deputies, and to carry them to the Hôtel de Ville, where about
two thousand men were congregated, consisting chiefly of artillerymen,
and of insurgents from the suburb of Saint Antoine, who already
expressed their resolution of marching against the Convention. But the
selfish and cowardly character of Robespierre was unfit for such a
crisis. He appeared altogether confounded and overwhelmed with what had
passed and was passing around him; and not one of all the victims of the
Reign of Terror felt its disabling influence so completely as he, the
despot who had so long directed its sway. He had not, even though the
means must have been in his power, the presence of mind to disperse
money in considerable sums, which of itself would not have failed to
ensure the support of the revolutionary rabble.
Meantime, the Convention continued to maintain the bold and commanding
front which they had so suddenly and critically assumed. Upon learning
the escape of the arrested deputies, and hearing of the insurrection at
the Hôtel de Ville, they instantly passed a decree outlawing Robespierre
and his associates, inflicting a similar doom upon the Mayor of Paris,
the Procureur and other members of the Commune, and charging twelve of
their members, the boldest who could be selected, to proceed with the
armed force to the execution of the sentence. The drums of the national
guards now beat to arms in all the sections under authority of the
Convention, while the tocsin continued to summon assistance with its
iron voice to Robespierre and the civic magistrates. Every thing
appeared to threaten a violent catastrophe, until it was seen clearly
that the public voice, and especially amongst the national guards, was
declaring itself generally against the Terrorists.
The Hôtel de Ville was surrounded by about fifteen hundred men, and
cannon turned upon the doors. The force of the assailants was weakest in
point of number, but their leaders were men of spirit, and night
concealed their inferiority of force.