till we read these Memoirs, we held our opinion with the diffidence
which becomes a judge who has only heard one side. The case seemed
strong, and in parts unanswerable; yet we did not know what the accused
party might have to say for himself; and not being much inclined to take
our fellow creatures either for angels of light or for angels of
darkness, we could not but feel some suspicion that his offences had
been exaggerated. That suspicion is now at an end. The vindication is
before us. It occupies four volumes. It was the work of forty years. It
would be absurd to suppose that it does not refute every serious charge
which admitted of refutation. How many serious charges, then, are here
refuted? Not a single one. Most of the imputations which have been
thrown on Barere he does not even notice. In such cases, of course,
judgment must go against him by default. The fact is, that nothing can
be more meagre and uninteresting than his account of the great public
transactions in which he was engaged. He gives us hardly a word of new
information respecting the proceedings of the Committee of Public
Safety; and, by way of compensation, tells us long stories about things
which happened before he emerged from obscurity, and after he had again
sunk into it. Nor is this the worst. As soon as he ceases to write
trifles, he begins to write lies; and such lies! A man who has never
been within the tropics does not know what a thunderstorm means; a man
who has never looked on Niagara has but a faint idea of a cataract; and
he who has not read Barere's Memoirs may be said not to know what it is
to lie. Among the numerous classes which make up the great genus
Mendacium, the Mendacium Vasconicum, or Gascon lie, has, during some
centuries, been highly esteemed as peculiarly circumstantial and
peculiarly impudent; and, among the Mendacia Vasconica, the Mendacium
Barerianum is, without doubt, the finest species. It is indeed a superb
variety, and quite throws into the shade some Mendacia which we were
used to regard with admiration. The Mendacium Wraxallianum, for example,
though by no means to be despised, will not sustain the comparison for a
moment. Seriously, we think that M. Hippolyte Carnot is much to blame
in this matter. We can hardly suppose him to be worse read than
ourselves in the history of the Convention, a history which must
interest him deeply, not only as a Frenchman, but also as a son. He
must, therefore, be perfectly aware that many of the most important
statements which these volumes contain are falsehoods, such as
Corneille's Dorante, or Moliere's Seapin, or Colin d'Harleville's
Monsieur de Crac would have been ashamed to utter. We are far, indeed,
from holding M. Hippolyte Carnot answerable for Barere's want of
veracity; but M. Hippolyte Carnot has arranged these Memoirs, has
introduced them to the world by a laudatory preface, has described them
as documents of great historical value, and has illustrated them by
notes. We cannot but think that, by acting thus, he contracted some
obligations of which he does not seem to have been at all aware; and
that he ought not to have suffered any monstrous fiction to go forth
under the sanction of his name, without adding a line at the foot of the
page for the purpose of cautioning the reader.
We will content ourselves at present with pointing out two instances of
Barere's wilful and deliberate mendacity; namely, his account of the
death of Marie Antoinette and his account of the death of the
Girondists. His account of the death of Marie Antoinette is as follows:
"Robespierre in his turn proposed that the members of the Capet family
should be banished, and that Marie Antoinette should be brought to trial
before the Revolutionary Tribunal. He would have been better employed in
concerting military measures which might have repaired our disasters in
Belgium, and might have arrested the progress of the enemies of the
Revolution in the west." (Vol. ii. p. 312.)
Now, it is notorious that Marie Antoinette was sent before the
Revolutionary Tribunal, not at Robespierre's instance, but in direct
opposition to Robespierre's wishes. We will cite a single authority,
which is quite decisive. Bonaparte, who had no conceivable motive to
disguise the truth, who had the best opportunities of knowing the truth,
and who, after his marriage with the Archduchess, naturally felt an
interest in the fate of his wife's kinswoman, distinctly affirmed that
Robespierre opposed the trying of the Queen.[15] Who, then, was the
person who really did propose that the Capet family should be banished,
and that Marie Antoinette should be tried? Full information will be
found in the Moniteur.[16] From that valuable record it appears that, on
the first of August, 1793, an orator, deputed by the Committee of Public
Safety, addressed the Convention in a long and elaborate discourse. He
asked, in passionate language, how it happened that the enemies of the
Republic still continued to hope for success. "Is it," he cried,
"because we have too long forgotten the crimes of the Austrian woman? Is
it because we have shown so strange an indulgence to the race of our
ancient tyrants? It is time that this unwise apathy should cease; it is
time to extirpate from the soil of the Republic the last roots of
royalty. As for the children of Louis the conspirator, they are hostages
for the Republic. The charge of their maintenance shall be reduced to
what is necessary for the food and keep of two individuals. The public
treasure shall no longer be lavished on creatures who have too long been
considered as privileged. But behind them lurks a woman who has been the
cause of all the disasters of France, and whose share in every project
adverse to the Revolution has long been known. National justice claims
its rights over her. It is to the tribunal appointed for the trial of
conspirators that she ought to be sent. It is only by striking the
Austrian woman that you can make Francis and George, Charles and
William, sensible of the crimes which their ministers and their armies
have committed." The speaker concluded by moving that Marie Antoinette
should be brought to judgment, and should, for that end, be forthwith
transferred to the Conciergerie; and that all the members of the House
of Capet, with the exception of those who were under the sword of the
law, and of the two children of Louis, should be banished from the
French territory. The motion was carried without debate.
Now, who was the person who made this speech and this motion? It was
Barere himself. It is clear, then, that Barere attributed his own mean
insolence and barbarity to one who, whatever his crimes may have been,
was in this matter innocent. The only question remaining is, whether
Barere was misled by his memory, or wrote a deliberate falsehood.
We are convinced that he wrote a deliberate falsehood. His memory is
described by his editors as remarkably good, and must have been bad
indeed if he could not remember such a fact as this. It is true that the
number of murders in which he subsequently bore a part was so great that
he might well confound one with another, that he might well forget what
part of the daily hecatomb was consigned to death by himself, and what
part by his colleagues. But two circumstances make it quite incredible
that the share which he took in the death of Marie Antoinette should
have escaped his recollection. She was one of his earliest victims. She
was one of his most illustrious victims. The most hardened assassin
remembers the first time that he shed blood; and the widow of Louis was
no ordinary sufferer. If the question had been about some milliner,
butchered for hiding in her garret her brother who had let drop a word
against the Jacobin club--if the question had been about some old nun,
dragged to death for having mumbled what were called fanatical words
over her beads--Barere's memory might well have deceived him. It would
be as unreasonable to expect him to remember all the wretches whom he
slew as all the pinches of snuff that he took. But, though Barere
murdered many hundreds of human beings, he murdered only one Queen. That
he, a small country lawyer, who, a few years before, would have thought
himself honored by a glance or a word from the daughter of so many
Caesars, should call her the Austrian woman, should send her from jail to
jail, should deliver her over to the executioner, was surely a great
event in his life. Whether he had reason to be proud of it or ashamed of
it, is a question on which we may perhaps differ from his editors; but
they will admit, we think, that he could not have forgotten it.
We, therefore, confidently charge Barere with having written a
deliberate falsehood; and we have no hesitation in saying that we never,
in the course of any historical researches that we have happened to
make, fell in with a falsehood so audacious, except only the falsehood
which we are about to expose.
Of the proceeding against the Girondists, Barere speaks with just
severity. He calls it an atrocious injustice perpetrated against the
legislators of the Republic. He complains that distinguished deputies,
who ought to have been readmitted to their seats in the Convention, were
sent to the scaffold as conspirators. The day, he exclaims, was a day of
mourning for France. It mutilated the national representation; it
weakened the sacred principle that the delegates of the people were
inviolable. He protests that he had no share in the guilt. "I have had,"
he says, "the patience to go through the Moniteur, extracting all the
charges brought against deputies, and all the decrees for arresting and
impeaching deputies. Nowhere will you find my name. I never brought a
charge against any of my colleagues, or made a report against any, or
drew up an impeachment against any."[17]
Now, we affirm that this is a lie. We affirm that Barere himself took
the lead in the proceedings of the Convention against the Girondists. We
affirm that he, on the twenty-eighth of July, 1793, proposed a decree
for bringing nine Girondist deputies to trial, and for putting to death
sixteen other Girondist deputies without any trial at all. We affirm
that when the accused deputies had been brought to trial, and when some
apprehension arose that their eloquence might produce an effect even on
the Revolutionary Tribunal, Barere did, on the eighth of Brumaire,
second a motion for a decree authorizing the tribunal to decide without
hearing out the defence; and, for the truth of every one of these things
so affirmed by us, we appeal to that very Moniteur to which Barere has
dared to appeal.[18]
What M. Hippolyte Carnot, knowing, as he must know, that this book
contains such falsehoods as those which we have exposed, can have meant,
when he described it as a valuable addition to our stock of historical
information, passes our comprehension. When a man is not ashamed to tell
lies about events which took place before hundreds of witnesses, and
which are recorded in well-known and accessible books, what credit can
we give to his account of things done in corners? No historian who does
not wish to be laughed at will ever cite the unsupported authority of
Barere as sufficient to prove any fact whatever. The only thing, as far
as we can see, on which these volumes throw any light, is the exceeding
baseness of the author.
So much for the veracity of the Memoirs. In a literary point of view,
they are beneath criticism. They are as shallow, flippant, and affected
as Barere's oratory in the Convention. They are also, what his oratory
in the Convention was not, utterly insipid. In fact, they are the mere
dregs and rinsings of a bottle of which even the first froth was but of
very questionable flavor.
We will now try to present our readers with a sketch of this man's life.
We shall, of course, make very sparing use indeed of his own Memoirs;
and never without distrust, except where they are confirmed by other
evidence.
Bertrand Barere was born in the year 1755, at Tarbes in Gascony. His
father was the proprietor of a small estate at Vieuzac, in the beautiful
vale of Argeles. Bertrand always loved to be called Barere de Vieuzac,
and flattered himself with the hope that, by the help of this feudal
addition to his name, he might pass for a gentleman. He was educated for
the bar at Toulouse, the seat of one of the most celebrated Parliaments
of the kingdom, practised as an advocate with considerable success, and
wrote some small pieces, which he sent to the principal literary
societies in the south of France. Among provincial towns, Toulouse seems
to have been remarkably rich in indifferent versifiers and critics. It
gloried especially in one venerable institution, called the Academy of
the Floral Games. This body held every year a grand meeting, which was a
subject of intense interest to the whole city, and at which flowers of
gold and silver were given as prizes for odes, for idyls, and for
something that was called eloquence. These bounties produced of course
the ordinary effect of bounties, and turned people who might have been
thriving attorneys and useful apothecaries into small wits and bad
poets. Barere does not appear to have been so lucky as to obtain any of
these precious flowers; but one of his performances was mentioned with
honor. At Montauban he was more fortunate. The Academy of that town
bestowed on him several prizes, one for a panegyric on Louis the
Twelfth, in which the blessings of monarchy and the loyalty of the
French nation were set forth; and another for a panegyric on poor Franc
de Pompignan, in which, as may easily be supposed, the philosophy of the
eighteenth century was sharply assailed. Then Barere found an old stone
inscribed with three Latin words, and wrote a dissertation upon it,
which procured him a seat in a learned Assembly, called the Toulouse
Academy of Sciences, Inscriptions, and Polite Literature. At length the
doors of the Academy of the Floral Games were opened to so much merit.
Barere, in his thirty-third year, took his seat as one of that
illustrious brotherhood, and made an inaugural oration which was greatly
admired. He apologizes for recounting these triumphs of his youthful
genius. We own that we cannot blame him for dwelling long on the least
disgraceful portion of his existence. To send in declamations for prizes
offered by provincial academies is indeed no very useful or dignified
employment for a bearded man; but it would have been well if Barere had
always been so employed.
In 1785 he married a young lady of considerable fortune. Whether she was
in other respects qualified to make a home happy is a point respecting
which we are imperfectly informed. In a little work entitled Melancholy
Pages, which was written in 1797, Barere avers that his marriage was one
of mere convenience, that at the altar his heart was heavy with
sorrowful forebodings, that he turned pale as he pronounced the solemn
"Yes," that unbidden tears rolled down his cheeks, that his mother
shared his presentiment, and that the evil omen was accomplished. "My
marriage," he says, "was one of the most unhappy of marriages." So
romantic a tale, told by so noted a liar, did not command our belief. We
were, therefore, not much surprised to discover that, in his Memoirs, he
calls his wife a most amiable woman, and declares that, after he had
been united to her six years, he found her as amiable as ever. He
complains, indeed, that she was too much attached to royalty and to the
old superstition; but he assures us that his respect for her virtues
induced him to tolerate her prejudices. Now Barere, at the time of his
marriage, was himself a Royalist and a Catholic. He had gained one prize
by flattering the Throne, and another by defending the Church. It is
hardly possible, therefore, that disputes about politics or religion
should have embittered his domestic life till some time after he became
a husband. Our own guess is, that his wife was, as he says, a virtuous
and amiable woman, and that she did her best to make him happy during
some years. It seems clear that, when circumstances developed the latent
atrocity of his character, she could no longer endure him, refused to
see him, and sent back his letters unopened. Then it was, we imagine,
that he invented the fable about his distress on his wedding day.
In 1788 Barere paid his first visit to Paris, attended reviews, heard
Laharpe at the Lyceum, and Condorcet at the Academy of Sciences, stared
at the envoys of Tippoo Saib, saw the Royal Family dine at Versailles,
and kept a journal in which he noted down adventures and speculations.
Some parts of this journal are printed in the first volume of the work
before us, and are certainly most characteristic. The worst vices of the
writer had not yet shown themselves; but the weakness which was the
parent of those vices appears in every line. His levity, his
inconsistency, his servility, were already what they were to the last.
All his opinions, all his feelings, spin round and round like a
weathercock in a whirlwind. Nay, the very impressions which he receives
through his senses are not the same two days together. He sees Louis the
Sixteenth, and is so much blinded by loyalty as to find his Majesty
handsome. "I fixed my eyes," he says, "with a lively curiosity on his
fine countenance, which I thought open and noble." The next time that
the King appears, all is altered. His Majesty's eyes are without the
smallest expression; he has a vulgar laugh which seems like idiocy, an
ignoble figure, an awkward gait, and the look of a big boy ill brought
up. It is the same with more important questions. Barere is for the
Parliaments on the Monday and against the Parliaments on the Tuesday,
for feudality in the morning and against feudality in the afternoon. One
day he admires the English constitution; then he shudders to think,
that, in the struggles by which that constitution had been obtained,
the barbarous islanders had murdered a king, and gives the preference to
the constitution of Bearn. Bearn, he says, has a sublime constitution, a
beautiful constitution. There the nobility and clergy meet in one House
and the Commons in another. If the Houses differ, the King his the
casting vote. A few weeks later we find him raving against the
principles of this sublime and beautiful constitution. To admit deputies
of the nobility and clergy into the legislature is, he says, neither
more nor less than to admit enemies of the nation into the legislature.
In this state of mind, without one settled purpose or opinion, the slave
of the last word, royalist, aristocrat, democrat, according to the
prevailing sentiment of the coffee-house or drawing-room into which he
had just looked, did Barere enter into public life. The States-General
had been summoned. Barere went down to his own province, was there
elected one of the representatives of the Third Estate, and returned to
Paris in May, 1789.
A great crisis, often predicted, had at last arrived. In no country, we
conceive, have intellectual freedom and political servitude existed
together so long as in France, during the seventy or eighty years which
preceded the last convocation of the Orders. Ancient abuses and new
theories flourished in equal vigor side by side. The people, having no
constitutional means of checking even the most flagitious misgovernment,
were indemnified for oppression by being suffered to luxuriate in
anarchical speculation, and to deny or ridicule every principle on which
the institutions of the state reposed. Neither those who attribute the
downfall of the old French institutions to the public grievances, nor
those who attribute it to the doctrines of the philosophers, appear to
us to have taken into their view more than one half of the subject.
Grievances as heavy have often been endured without producing a
revolution; doctrines as bold have often been propounded without
producing a revolution. The question, whether the French nation was
alienated from its old polity by the follies and vices of the Viziers
and Sultanas who pillaged and disgraced it, or by the writings of
Voltaire and Rousseau, seems to us as idle as the question whether it
was fire or gunpowder that blew up the mills at Hounslow. Neither cause
would have sufficed alone. Tyranny may last through ages where
discussion is suppressed. Discussion may safely be left free by rulers
who act on popular principles. But combine a press like that of London
with a government like that of St. Petersburg, and the inevitable effect
will be an explosion that will shake the world. So it was in France.
Despotism and License, mingling in unblessed union, engendered that
mighty Revolution in which the lineaments of both parents were strangely
blended. The long gestation was accomplished; and Europe saw, with mixed
hopes and terror, that agonizing travail and that portentous birth.
Among the crowd of legislators which at this conjuncture poured from all
the provinces of France into Paris, Barere made no contemptible figure.
The opinions which he for the moment professed were popular, yet not
extreme. His character was fair; his personal advantages are said to
have been considerable; and, from the portrait which is prefixed to
these Memoirs, and which represents him as he appeared in the
Convention, we should judge that his features must have been strikingly
handsome, though we think that we can read in them cowardice and
meanness very legibly written by the hand of God. His conversation was
lively and easy; his manners remarkably good for a country lawyer. Women
of rank and wit said that he was the only man who, on his first arrival
from a remote province, had that indescribable air which it was supposed
that Paris alone could give. His eloquence, indeed, was by no means so
much admired in the capital as it had been by the ingenious academicians
of Montauban and Toulouse. His style was thought very bad; and very
bad, if a foreigner may venture to judge, it continued to the last. It
would, however, be unjust to deny that he had some talents for speaking
and writing. His rhetoric, though deformed by every imaginable fault of
taste, from bombast down to buffoonery, was not wholly without force and
vivacity. He had also one quality which, in active life, often gives
fourth-rate men an advantage over first-rate men. Whatever he could do
he could do without effort, at any moment, in any abundance, and on any
side of any question. There was, indeed, a perfect harmony between his
moral character and his intellectual character. His temper was that of a
slave; his abilities were exactly those which qualified him to be a
useful slave. Of thinking to purpose, he was utterly incapable; but he
had wonderful readiness in arranging and expressing thoughts furnished
by others.
In the National Assembly he had no opportunity of displaying the full
extent either of his talents or of his vices. He was indeed eclipsed by
much abler men. He went, as was his habit, with the stream, spoke
occasionally with some success, and edited a journal called the Point du
Jour, in which the debates of the Assembly were reported.
He at first ranked by no means among the violent reformers. He was not
friendly to that new division of the French territory which was among
the most important changes introduced by the Revolution, and was
especially unwilling to see his native province dismembered. He was
entrusted with the task of framing Reports on the Woods and Forests.
Louis was exceedingly anxious about this matter; for his Majesty was a
keen sportsman, and would much rather have gone without the Veto, or the
prerogative of making peace and war, than without his hunting and
shooting. Gentlemen of the royal household were sent to Barere, in order
to intercede for the deer and pheasants. Nor was this intercession
unsuccessful. The reports were so drawn that Barere was afterwards
accused of having dishonestly sacrificed the interests of the public to
the tastes of the court. To one of these reports he had the
inconceivable folly and bad taste to prefix a punning motto from Virgil,
fit only for such essays as he had been in the habit of composing for
the Floral Games:--