voted against the appeal to the people and against the respite. His
demeanor and his language also were widely different from those of the
Girondists. Their hearts were heavy, and their deportment was that of
men oppressed by sorrow. It was Vergniaud's duty to proclaim the result
of the roll call. His face was pale, and he trembled with emotion, as in
a low and broken voice he announced that Louis was condemned to death.
Barere had not, it is true, yet attained to full perfection in the art
of mingling jests and conceits with words of death; but he already gave
promise of his future excellence in this high department of Jacobin
oratory. He concluded his speech with a sentence worthy of his head and
heart. "The tree of liberty," he said, "as an ancient author remarks,
flourishes when it is watered with the blood of all classes of tyrants."
M. Hippolyte Carnot has quoted this passage in order, as we suppose, to
do honor to his hero. We wish that a note had been added to inform us
from what ancient author Barere quoted. In the course of our own small
reading among the Greek and Latin writers, we have not happened to fall
in with trees of liberty and watering-pots full of blood; nor can we,
such is our ignorance of classical antiquity, even imagine an Attic or
Roman orator employing imagery of that sort. In plain words, when Barere
talked about an ancient author, he was lying, as he generally was when
he asserted any fact, great or small. Why he lied on this occasion we
cannot guess, unless indeed it was to keep his hand in.
It is not improbable that, but for one circumstance, Barere would, like
most of those with whom he ordinarily acted, have voted for the appeal
to the people and for the respite. But, just before the commencement of
the trial, papers had been discovered which proved that, while a member
of the National Assembly, he had been in communication with the Court
respecting his Reports on the Woods and Forests. He was acquitted of all
criminality by the Convention; but the fiercer Republicans considered
him as a tool of the fallen monarch; and this reproach was long repeated
in the journal of Marat, and in the speeches at the Jacobin club. It was
natural that a man like Barere should, under such circumstances, try to
distinguish himself among the crowd of regicides by peculiar ferocity.
It was because he had been a royalist that he was one of the foremost in
shedding blood.
The King was no more. The leading Girondists had, by their conduct
towards him, lowered their character in the eyes both of friends and
foes. They still, however, maintained the contest against the Mountain,
called for vengeance on the assassins of September, and protested
against the anarchical and sanguinary doctrines of Marat. For a time
they seemed likely to prevail. As publicists and orators they had no
rivals in the Convention. They had with them, beyond all doubt, the
great majority both of the deputies and of the French nation. These
advantages, it should seem, ought to have decided the event of the
struggle. But the opposite party had compensating advantages of a
different kind. The chiefs of the Mountain, though not eminently
distinguished by eloquence or knowledge, had great audacity, activity,
and determination. The Convention and France were against them; but the
mob of Paris, the clubs of Paris, and the municipal government of Paris,
were on their side.
The policy of the Jacobins, in this situation, was to subject France to
an aristocracy infinitely worse than that aristocracy which had
emigrated with the Count of Artois--to an aristocracy not of birth, not
of wealth, not of education, but of mere locality. They would not hear
of privileged orders: but they wished to have a privileged city. That
twenty-five millions of Frenchmen should be ruled by a hundred thousand
gentlemen and clergymen was insufferable; but that twenty-five millions
of Frenchmen should be ruled by a hundred thousand Parisians was as it
should be. The qualification of a member of the new oligarchy was simply
that he should live near the hall where the Convention met, and should
be able to squeeze himself daily into the gallery during a debate, and
now and then to attend with a pike for the purpose of blockading the
doors. It was quite agreeable to the maxims of the Mountain that a score
of draymen from Santerre's brewery, or of devils from Hebert's
printing-house, should be permitted to drown the voices of men
commissioned to speak the sense of such cities as Marseilles, Bordeaux,
and Lyons; and that a rabble of half-naked porters from the Faubourg St.
Antoine should have power to annul decrees for which the representatives
of fifty or sixty departments had voted. It was necessary to find some
pretext for so odious and absurd a tyranny. Such a pretext was found. To
the old phrases of liberty and equality were added the sonorous
watchwords, unity and indivisibility. A new crime was invented, and
called by the name of federalism. The object of the Girondists, it was
asserted, was to break up the great nation into little independent
commonwealths, bound together only by a league like that which connects
the Swiss Cantons or the United States of America. The great obstacle in
the way of this pernicious design was the influence of Paris. To
strengthen the influence of Paris ought therefore to be the chief object
of every patriot.
The accusation brought against the leaders of the Girondist party was a
mere calumny. They were undoubtedly desirous to prevent the capital from
domineering over the republic, and would gladly have seen the Convention
removed for a time to some provincial town, or placed under the
protection of a trusty guard, which might have overawed the Parisian
mob; but there is not the slightest reason to suspect them of any
design against the unity of the state. Barere, however, really was a
federalist, and, we are inclined to believe, the only federalist in the
Convention. As far as a man so unstable and servile can be said to have
felt any preference for any form of government, he felt a preference for
federal government. He was born under the Pyrenees; he was a Gascon of
the Gascons, one of a people strongly distinguished by intellectual and
moral character, by manners, by modes of speech, by accent, and by
physiognomy from the French of the Seine and of the Loire; and he had
many of the peculiarities of the race to which he belonged. When he
first left his own province he had attained his thirty-fourth year, and
had acquired a high local reputation for eloquence and literature. He
had then visited Paris for the first time. He had found himself in a new
world. His feelings were those of a banished man. It is clear also that
he had been by no means without his share of the small disappointments
and humiliations so often experienced by men of letters who, elated by
provincial applause, venture to display their powers before the
fastidious critics of a capital. On the other hand, whenever he
revisited the mountains among which he had been born, he found himself
an object of general admiration. His dislike of Paris and his partiality
to his native district were therefore as strong and durable as any
sentiments of a mind like his could be. He long continued to maintain
that the ascendency of one great city was the bane of France; that the
superiority of taste and intelligence which it was the fashion to
ascribe to the inhabitants of that city were wholly imaginary; and that
the nation would never enjoy a really good government till the Alsatian
people, the Breton people, the people of Bearn, the people of Provence,
should have each an independent existence, and laws suited to its own
tastes and habits. These communities he proposed to unite by a tie
similar to that which binds together the grave Puritans of Connecticut
and the dissolute slave-drivers of New Orleans. To Paris he was
unwilling to grant even the rank which Washington holds in the United
States. He thought it desirable that the congress of the French
federation should have no fixed place of meeting, but should sit
sometimes at Rouen, sometimes at Bordeaux, sometimes at his own
Toulouse.
Animated by such feelings, he was, till the close of May, 1793, a
Girondist, if not an ultra-Girondist. He exclaimed against those impure
and bloodthirsty men who wished to make the public danger a pretext for
cruelty and rapine. "Peril," he said, "could be no excuse for crime. It
is when the wind blows hard, and the waves run high, that the anchor is
most needed; it is when a revolution is raging that the great laws of
morality are most necessary to the safety of a state." Of Marat he spoke
with abhorrence and contempt; of the municipal authorities of Paris with
just severity. He loudly complained that there were Frenchmen who paid
to the Mountain that homage which was due to the Convention alone. When
the establishment of the Revolutionary Tribunal was first proposed, he
joined himself to Vergniaud and Buzot, who strongly objected to that
odious measure. "It cannot be," exclaimed Barere, "that men really
attached to liberty will imitate the most frightful excesses of
despotism!" He proved to the Convention, after his fashion, out of
Sallust, that such arbitrary courts may indeed, for a time, be severe
only on real criminals, but must inevitably degenerate into instruments
of private cupidity and revenge. When, on the tenth of March, the worst
part of the population of Paris made the first unsuccessful attempt to
destroy the Girondists, Barere eagerly called for vigorous measures of
repression and punishment. On the second of April, another attempt of
the Jacobins of Paris to usurp supreme dominion over the republic was
brought to the knowledge of the Convention; and again Barere spoke with
warmth against the new tyranny which afflicted France, and declared
that the people of the departments would never crouch beneath the
tyranny of one ambitious city. He even proposed a resolution to the
effect that the Convention would exert against the demagogues of the
capital the same energy which had been exerted against the tyrant Louis.
We are assured that, in private as in public, he at this time uniformly
spoke with strong aversion of the Mountain.
His apparent zeal for the cause of humanity and order had its reward.
Early in April came the tidings of Dumourier's defection. This was a
heavy blow to the Girondists. Dumourier was their general. His victories
had thrown a lustre on the whole party; his army, it had been hoped,
would, in the worst event, protect the deputies of the nation against
the ragged pikemen of the garrets of Paris. He was now a deserter and an
exile; and those who had lately placed their chief reliance on his
support were compelled to join with their deadliest enemies in
execrating his treason. At this perilous conjuncture, it was resolved to
appoint a Committee of Public Safety, and to arm that committee with
powers, small indeed when compared with those which it afterwards drew
to itself, but still great and formidable. The moderate party regarding
Barere as a representative of their feelings and opinions, elected him a
member. In his new situation he soon began to make himself useful. He
brought to the deliberations of the Committee, not indeed the knowledge
or the ability of a great statesman, but a tongue and a pen which, if
others would only supply ideas, never paused for want of words. His mind
was a mere organ of communication between other minds. It originated
nothing; it retained nothing; but it transmitted everything. The post
assigned to him by his colleagues was not really of the highest
importance; but it was prominent, and drew the attention of all Europe.
When a great measure was to be brought forward, when an account was to
be rendered of an important event, he was generally the mouthpiece of
the administration. He was therefore not unnaturally considered, by
persons who lived at a distance from the seat of government, and above
all by foreigners who, while the war raged, knew France only from
journals, as the head of that administration of which, in truth, he was
only the secretary and the spokesman. The author of the History of
Europe in our own Annual Registers appears to have been completely under
this delusion.
The conflict between the hostile parties was meanwhile fast approaching
to a crisis. The temper of Paris grew daily fiercer and fiercer.
Delegates appointed by thirty-five of the forty-eight wards of the city
appeared at the bar of the Convention, and demanded that Vergniaud,
Brissot, Guadet, Gensonne, Barbaroux, Buzot, Petion, Louvet, and many
other deputies, should be expelled. This demand was disapproved by at
least three fourths of the Assembly, and, when known in the departments,
called forth a general cry of indignation. Bordeaux declared that it
would stand by its representatives, and would, if necessary, defend them
by the sword against the tyranny of Paris. Lyons and Marseilles were
animated by a similar spirit. These manifestations of public opinion
gave courage to the majority of the Convention. Thanks were voted to the
people of Bordeaux for their patriotic declaration; and a commission
consisting of twelve members was appointed for the purpose of
investigating the conduct of the municipal authorities of Paris, and was
empowered to place under arrest such persons as should appear to have
been concerned in any plot against the authority of the Convention. This
measure was adopted on the motion of Barere.
A few days of stormy excitement and profound anxiety followed; and then
came the crash. On the thirty-first of May the mob of Paris rose; the
palace of the Tuileries was besieged by a vast array of pikes; the
majority of the deputies, after vain struggles and remonstrances,
yielded to violence, and suffered the Mountain to carry a decree for the
suspension and arrest of the deputies whom the wards of the capital had
accused.
During this contest, Barere had been tossed backwards and forwards
between the two raging factions. His feelings, languid and unsteady as
they always were, drew him to the Girondists; but he was awed by the
vigor and determination of the Mountain. At one moment he held high and
firm language, complained that the Convention was not free, and
protested against the validity of any vote passed under coercion. At
another moment he proposed to conciliate the Parisians by abolishing
that commission of twelve which he had himself proposed only a few days
before; and himself drew up a paper condemning the very measures which
had been adopted at his own instance, and eulogizing the public spirit
of the insurgents. To do him justice, it was not without some symptoms
of shame that he read this document from the tribune, where he had so
often expressed very different sentiments. It is said that, at some
passages, he was even seen to blush. It may have been so; he was still
in his novitiate of infamy.
Some days later he proposed that hostages for the personal safety of the
accused deputies should be sent to the departments, and offered to be
himself one of those hostages. Nor do we in the least doubt that the
offer was sincere. He would, we firmly believe, have thought himself far
safer at Bordeaux or Marseilles than at Paris. His proposition, however,
was not carried into effect; and he remained in the power of the
victorious Mountain.
This was the great crisis of his life. Hitherto he had done nothing
inexpiable, nothing which marked him out as a much worse man than most
of his colleagues in the Convention. His voice had generally been on the
side of moderate measures. Had he bravely cast in his lot with the
Girondists, and suffered with them, he would, like them, have had a not
dishonorable place in history. Had he like the great body of deputies
who meant well, but who had not the courage to expose themselves to
martyrdom, crouched quietly under the dominion of the triumphant
minority, and suffered every motion of Robespierre and Billaud to pass
unopposed, he would have incurred no peculiar ignominy. But it is
probable that this course was not open to him. He had been too prominent
among the adversaries of the Mountain to be admitted to quarter without
making some atonement. It was necessary that, if he hoped to find pardon
from his new lords, he should not be merely a silent and passive slave.
What passed in private between him and them cannot be accurately
related; but the result was soon apparent. The Committee of Public
Safety was renewed. Several of the fiercest of the dominant faction,
Couthon, for example, and St. Just, were substituted for more moderate
politicians; but Barere was suffered to retain his seat at the Board.
The indulgence with which he was treated excited the murmurs of some
stern and ardent zealots. Marat, in the very last words that he
wrote,--words not published till the dagger of Charlotte Corday had
avenged France and mankind,--complained that a man who had no
principles, who was always on the side of the strongest, who had been a
royalist, and who was ready, in case of a turn of fortune, to be a
royalist again, should be entrusted with an important share in the
administration.[19] But the chiefs of the Mountain judged more
correctly. They knew indeed, as well as Marat, that Barere was a man
utterly without faith or steadiness; that, if he could be said to have
any political leaning, his leaning was not towards them; that he felt
for the Girondist party that faint and wavering sort of preference of
which alone his nature was susceptible; and that, if he had been at
liberty to make his choice, he would rather have murdered Robespierre
and Danton than Vergniaud and Gensonne. But they justly appreciated that
levity which made him incapable alike of earnest love and of earnest
hatred, and that meanness which made it necessary to him to have a
master. In truth, what the planters of Carolina and Louisiana say of
black men with flat noses and woolly hair was strictly true of Barere.
The curse of Canaan was upon him. He was born a slave. Baseness was an
instinct in him. The impulse which drove him from a party in adversity
to a party in prosperity was as irresistible as that which drives the
cuckoo and the swallow towards the sun when the dark and cold months are
approaching. The law which doomed him to be the humble attendant of
stronger spirits resembled the law which binds the pilot-fish to the
shark. "Ken ye," said a shrewd Scotch lord, who was asked his opinion of
James the First,--"ken ye a John Ape? If I have Jacko by the collar, I
can make him bite you; but, if you have Jacko, you can make him bite
me." Just such a creature was Barere. In the hands of the Girondists he
would have been eager to proscribe the Jacobins; he was just as ready,
in the gripe of the Jacobins, to proscribe the Girondists. On the
fidelity of such a man the heads of the Mountain could not, of course,
reckon; but they valued their conquest as the very easy and not very
delicate lover in Congreve's lively song valued the conquest of a
prostitute of a different kind. Barere was, like Chloe, false and
common; but he was, like Chloe, constant while possessed; and they asked
no more. They needed a service which he was perfectly competent to
perform. Destitute as he was of all the talents both of an active and of
a speculative statesman, he could with great facility draw up a report,
or make a speech on any subject and on any side. If other people would
furnish facts and thoughts, he could always furnish phrases; and this
talent was absolutely at the command of his owners for the time being.
Nor had he excited any angry passion among those to whom he had hitherto
been opposed. They felt no more hatred to him than they felt to the
horses which dragged the cannon of the Duke of Brunswick and of the
Prince of Saxe-Coburg. The horses had only done according to their kind,
and would, if they fell into the hands of the French, drag with equal
vigor and equal docility the guns of the republic, and therefore ought
not merely to be spared, but to be well fed and curried. So was it with
Barere. He was of a nature so low that it might be doubted whether he
could properly be an object of the hostility of reasonable beings. He
had not been an enemy; he was not now a friend. But he had been an
annoyance; and he would now be a help.
But, though the heads of the Mountain pardoned this man, and admitted
him into partnership with themselves, it was not without exacting
pledges such as made it impossible for him, false and fickle as he was,
ever again to find admission into the ranks which he had deserted. That
was truly a terrible sacrament by which they admitted the apostate into
their communion. They demanded of him that he should himself take the
most prominent part in murdering his old friends. To refuse was as much
as his life was worth. But what is life worth when it is only one long
agony of remorse and shame? These, however, are feelings of which it is
idle to talk when we are considering the conduct of such a man as
Barere. He undertook the task, mounted the tribune, and told the
Convention that the time was come for taking the stern attitude of
justice, and for striking at all conspirators without distinction. He
then moved that Buzot, Barbaroux, Petion, and thirteen other deputies,
should be placed out of the pale of the law, or, in other words,
beheaded without a trial; and that Vergniaud, Guadet, Gensonne, and six
others, should be impeached. The motion was carried without debate.
We have already seen with what effrontery Barere has denied, in these
Memoirs, that he took any part against the Girondists. This denial, we
think, was the only thing wanting to make his infamy complete. The most
impudent of all lies was a fit companion for the foulest of all murders.
Barere, however, had not yet earned his pardon. The Jacobin party
contained one gang which, even in that party, was preeminent in every
mean and every savage vice, a gang so low-minded and so inhuman that,
compared with them, Robespierre might be called magnanimous and
merciful. Of these wretches Hebert was perhaps the best representative.
His favorite amusement was to torment and insult the miserable remains
of that great family which, having ruled France during eight hundred
years, had now become an object of pity to the humblest artisan or
peasant. The influence of this man, and of men like him, induced the
Committee of Public Safety to determine that Marie Antoinette should be
sent to the scaffold. Barere was again summoned to his duty. Only four
days after he had proposed the decrees against the Girondist deputies he
again mounted the tribune, in order to move that the Queen should be
brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal. He was improving fast in the
society of his new allies. When he asked for the heads of Vergniaud and
Petion he had spoken like a man who had some slight sense of his own
guilt and degradation: he had said little; and that little had not been
violent. The office of expatiating on the guilt of his old friends he
had left to St. Just. Very different was Barere's second appearance in
the character of an accuser. He now cried out for blood in the eager
tones of the true and burning thirst, and raved against the Austrian
woman with the virulence natural to a coward who finds himself at
liberty to outrage that which he has feared and envied. We have already
exposed the shameless mendacity with which, in these Memoirs, he
attempts to throw the blame of his own guilt on the guiltless.