dead, to her doom Barere regaled Robespierre and some other Jacobins at
a tavern. Robespierre's acceptance of the invitation caused some
surprise to those who knew how long and how bitterly it was his nature
to hate. "Robespierre of the party!" muttered St. Just. "Barere is the
only man whom Robespierre has forgiven." We have an account of this
singular repast from one of the guests. Robespierre condemned the
senseless brutality with which Hebert had conducted the proceedings
against the Austrian woman, and, in talking on that subject, became so
much excited that he broke his plate in the violence of his
gesticulation. Barere exclaimed that the guillotine had cut a diplomatic
knot which it might have been difficult to untie. In the intervals
between the beaune and the champagne, between the ragout of thrushes and
the partridge with truffles, he fervently preached his new political
creed. "The vessel of the revolution," he said, "can float into port
only on waves of blood. We must begin with the members of the National
Assembly and of the Legislative Assembly. That rubbish must be swept
away."
As he talked at table he talked in the Convention. His peculiar style of
oratory was now formed. It was not altogether without ingenuity and
liveliness. But in any other age or country it would have been thought
unfit for the deliberations of a grave assembly, and still more unfit
for state papers. It might, perhaps, succeed at a meeting of a
Protestant Association in Exeter Hall, at a Repeal dinner in Ireland,
after men had well drunk, or in an American oration on the Fourth of
July. No legislative body would now endure it. But in France, during the
reign of the Convention, the old laws of composition were held in as
much contempt as the old government or the old creed. Correct and noble
diction belonged, like the etiquette of Versailles and the solemnities
of Notre Dame, to an age which had passed away. Just as a swarm of
ephemeral constitutions, democratic, directorial, and consular, sprang
from the decay of the ancient monarchy; just as a swarm of new
superstitions, the worship of the Goddess of Reason, and the fooleries
of the Theo-philanthropists, sprang from the decay of the ancient
Church; even so, out of the decay of the ancient French eloquence sprang
new fashions of eloquence, for the understanding of which new grammars
and dictionaries were necessary. The same innovating spirit which
altered the common phrases of salutation, which turned hundreds of Johns
and Peters into Scaevolas and Aristogitons, and which expelled Sunday and
Monday, January and February, Lady-day and Christmas, from the calendar,
in order to substitute Decadi and Primidi, Nivose and Pluviose, Feasts
of Opinion and Feasts of the Supreme Being, changed all the forms of
official correspondence. For the calm, guarded, and sternly courteous
language which governments had long been accustomed to employ, were
substituted puns, interjections, Ossianic rants, rhetoric worthy only of
a schoolboy, scurrility worthy only of a fish-wife. Of the phraseology
which was now thought to be peculiarly well suited to a report or a
manifesto Barere had a greater command than any man of his time, and,
during the short and sharp paroxysm of the revolutionary delirium,
passed for a great orator. When the fit was over, he was considered as
what he really was, a man of quick apprehension and fluent elocution,
with no originality, with little information, and with a taste as bad as
his heart. His Reports were popularly called Carmagnoles. A few months
ago we should have had some difficulty in conveying to an English reader
an exact notion of the state papers to which this appellation was given.
Fortunately a noble and distinguished person, whom her Majesty's
Ministers have thought qualified to fill the most important post in the
empire, has made our task easy. Whoever has read Lord Ellenborough's
proclamations is able to form a complete idea of a Carmagnole.
The effect which Barere's discourses at one time produced is not to be
wholly attributed to the perversion of the national taste. The occasions
on which he rose were frequently such as would have secured to the worst
speaker a favorable hearing. When any military advantage had been
gained, he was generally deputed by the Committee of Public Safety to
announce the good news. The hall resounded with applause as he mounted
the tribune, holding the dispatches in his hand. Deputies and strangers
listened with delight while he told them that victory was the order of
the day; that the guineas of Pitt had been vainly lavished to hire
machines six feet high, carrying guns; that the flight of the English
leopard deserved to be celebrated by Tyrtaeus; and that the saltpetre dug
out of the cellars of Paris had been turned into thunder, which would
crush the Titan brethren, George and Francis.
Meanwhile the trial of the accused Girondists, who were under arrest in
Paris, came on. They flattered themselves with a vain hope of escape.
They placed some reliance on their innocence, and some reliance on their
eloquence. They thought that shame would suffice to restrain any man,
however violent and cruel, from publicly committing the flagrant
iniquity of condemning them to death. The Revolutionary Tribunal was new
to its functions. No member of the Convention had yet been executed; and
it was probable that the boldest Jacobin would shrink from being the
first to violate the sanctity which was supposed to belong to the
representatives of the people.
The proceedings lasted some days. Gensonne and Brissot defended
themselves with great ability and presence of mind against the vile
Hebert and Chaumette, who appeared as accusers. The eloquent voice of
Vergniaud was heard for the last time. He pleaded his own cause and that
of his friends, with such force of reason and elevation of sentiment
that a murmur of pity and admiration rose from the audience. Nay, the
court itself, not yet accustomed to riot in daily carnage, showed signs
of emotion. The sitting was adjourned; and a rumor went forth that there
would be an acquittal. The Jacobins met, breathing vengeance.
Robespierre undertook to be their organ. He rose on the following day in
the Convention, and proposed a decree of such atrocity that even among
the acts of that year it can hardly be paralleled. By this decree the
tribunal was empowered to cut short the defence of the prisoners, to
pronounce the case clear, and to pass immediate judgment. One deputy
made a faint opposition. Barere instantly sprang up to support
Robespierre,--Barere, the federalist; Barere, the author of that
Commission of Twelve which was among the chief causes of the hatred
borne by Paris to the Girondists; Barere, who in these Memoirs denies
that he ever took any part against the Girondists; Barere, who has the
effrontery to declare that he greatly loved and esteemed Vergniaud. The
decree was passed; and the tribunal, without suffering the prisoners to
conclude what they had to say, pronounced them guilty.
The following day was the saddest in the sad history of the Revolution.
The sufferers were so innocent, so brave, so eloquent, so accomplished,
so young. Some of them were graceful and handsome youths of six or seven
and twenty. Vergniaud and Gensonne were little more than thirty. They
had been only a few months engaged in public affairs. In a few months
the fame of their genius had filled Europe; and they were to die for no
crime but this, that they had wished to combine order, justice, and
mercy with freedom. Their great fault was want of courage. We mean want
of political courage; of that courage which is proof to clamor and
obloquy, and which meets great emergencies by daring and decisive
measures. Alas! they had but too good an opportunity of proving that
they did not want courage to endure with manly cheerfulness the worst
that could be inflicted by such tyrants as St. Just, and such slaves as
Barere.
They were not the only victims of the noble cause. Madame Roland
followed them to the scaffold with a spirit as heroic as their own. Her
husband was in a safe hiding-place, but could not bear to survive her.
His body was found on the highroad near Rouen. He had fallen on his
sword. Condorcet swallowed opium. At Bordeaux the steel fell on the
necks of the bold and quick-witted Guadet and of Barbaroux, the chief of
those enthusiasts from the Rhone whose valor, in the great crisis of the
tenth of August, had turned back the tide of battle from the Louvre to
the Tuileries. In a field near the Garonne was found all that the wolves
had left of Petion, once honored, greatly indeed beyond his deserts, as
the model of republican virtue. We are far from regarding even the best
of the Girondists with unmixed admiration; but history owes to them this
honorable testimony, that, being free to choose whether they would be
oppressors or victims, they deliberately and firmly resolved rather to
suffer injustice than to inflict it.
And now began that strange period known by the name of the Reign of
Terror. The Jacobins had prevailed. This was their hour, and the power
of darkness. The Convention was subjugated and reduced to profound
silence on the highest questions of state. The sovereignty passed to the
Committee of Public Safety. To the edicts framed by that Committee the
representative assembly did not venture to offer even the species of
opposition which the ancient Parliament had frequently offered to the
mandates of the ancient kings. Six persons held the chief power in the
small cabinet which now domineered over France,--Robespierre, St. Just,
Couthon, Collot, Billaud, and Barere.
To some of these men, and of those who adhered to them, it is due to say
that the fanaticism which had emancipated them from the restraints of
justice and compassion had emancipated them also from the dominion of
vulgar cupidity and of vulgar fear; that, while hardly knowing where to
find an assignat of a few francs to pay for a dinner, they expended with
strict integrity the immense revenue which they collected by every art
of rapine; and that they were ready, in support of their cause, to mount
the scaffold with as much indifference as they showed when they signed
the death-warrants of aristocrats and priests. But no great party can be
composed of such materials as these. It is the inevitable law that such
zealots as we have described shall collect around them a multitude of
slaves, of cowards, and of libertines, whose savage tempers and
licentious appetites, withheld only by the dread of law and magistracy
from the worst excesses, are called into full activity by the hope of
impunity. A faction which, from whatever motive, relaxes the great laws
of morality is certain to be joined by the most immoral part of the
community. This has been repeatedly proved in religious wars. The war of
the Holy Sepulchre, the Albigensian war, the Huguenot war, the Thirty
Years' war, all originated in pious zeal. That zeal inflamed the
champions of the church to such a point that they regarded all
generosity to the vanquished as a sinful weakness. The infidel, the
heretic, was to be run down like a mad dog. No outrage committed by the
Catholic warrior on the miscreant enemy could deserve punishment. As
soon as it was known that boundless license was thus given to barbarity
and dissoluteness, thousands of wretches who cared nothing for the
sacred cause, but who were eager to be exempted from the police of
peaceful cities, and the discipline of well-governed camps, flocked to
the standard of the faith. The men who had set up that standard were
sincere, chaste, regardless of lucre, and, perhaps, where only
themselves were concerned, not unforgiving; but round that standard were
assembled such gangs of rogues, ravishers, plunderers, and ferocious
bravoes, as were scarcely ever found under the flag of any state engaged
in a mere temporal quarrel. In a very similar way was the Jacobin party
composed. There was a small nucleus of enthusiasts; round that nucleus
was gathered a vast mass of ignoble depravity; and in all that mass
there was nothing so depraved and so ignoble as Barere.
Then came those days when the most barbarous of all codes was
administered by the most barbarous of all tribunals; when no man could
greet his neighbors, or say his prayers, or dress his hair, without
danger of committing a capital crime; when spies lurked in every corner;
when the guillotine was long and hard at work every morning; when the
jails were filled as close as the hold of a slave ship; when the gutters
ran foaming with blood into the Seine; when it was death to be
great-niece of a captain of the royal guards, or half-brother of a
doctor of the Sorbonne, to express a doubt whether assignats would not
fall, to hint that the English had been victorious in the action of the
first of June, to have a copy of one of Burke's pamphlets locked up in a
desk, to laugh at a Jacobin for taking the name of Cassius or Timoleon,
or to call the Fifth Sans-Culottide by its old superstitious name of St.
Matthew's Day. While the daily wagon-loads of victims were carried to
their doom through the streets of Paris, the Proconsuls whom the
sovereign Committee had sent forth to the departments revelled in an
extravagance of cruelty unknown even in the capital. The knife of the
deadly machine rose and fell too slow for their work of slaughter. Long
rows of captives were mowed down with grapeshot. Holes were made in the
bottom of crowded barges. Lyons was turned into a desert. At Arras even
the cruel mercy of a speedy death was denied to the prisoners. All down
the Loire, from Saumur to the sea, great flocks of crows and kites
feasted on naked corpses, twined together in hideous embraces. No mercy
was shown to sex or age. The number of young lads and of girls of
seventeen who were murdered by that execrable government is to be
reckoned by hundreds. Babies, torn from the breast were tossed from
pike to pike along the Jacobin ranks. One champion of liberty had his
pockets well stuffed with ears. Another swaggered about with the finger
of a little child in his hat. A few months had sufficed to degrade
France below the level of New Zealand.
It is absurd to say that any amount of public danger can justify a
system like this, we do not say on Christian principles, we do not say
on the principles of a high morality, but even on principles of
Machiavellian policy. It is true that great emergencies call for
activity and vigilance; it is true that they justify severity which, in
ordinary times, would deserve the name of cruelty. But indiscriminate
severity can never, under any circumstances, be useful. It is plain that
the whole efficacy of punishment depends on the care with which the
guilty are distinguished. Punishment which strikes the guilty and the
innocent promiscuously operates merely like a pestilence or a great
convulsion of nature, and has no more tendency to prevent offences than
the cholera, or an earthquake like that of Lisbon, would have. The
energy for which the Jacobin administration is praised was merely the
energy of the Malay who maddens himself with opium, draws his knife, and
runs a-muck through the streets, slashing right and left at friends and
foes. Such has never been the energy of truly great rulers; of
Elizabeth, for example, of Oliver, or of Frederic. They were not,
indeed, scrupulous. But, had they been less scrupulous than they were,
the strength and amplitude of their minds would have preserved them from
crimes such as those which the small men of the Committee of Public
Safety took for daring strokes of policy. The great Queen who so long
held her own against foreign and domestic enemies, against temporal and
spiritual arms; the great Protector who governed with more than regal
power, in despite both of royalists and republicans; the great King who,
with a beaten army and an exhausted treasury, defended his little
dominions to the last against the united efforts of Russia, Austria,
and France--with what scorn would they have heard that it was impossible
for them to strike a salutary terror into the disaffected without
sending schoolboys and schoolgirls to death by cartloads and boatloads!
The popular notion is, we believe, that the leading Terrorists were
wicked men, but, at the same time, great men. We can see nothing great
about them but their wickedness. That their policy was daringly original
is a vulgar error. Their policy is as old as the oldest accounts which
we have of human misgovernment. It seemed new in France and in the
eighteenth century only because it had been long disused, for excellent
reasons, by the enlightened part of mankind. But it has always
prevailed, and still prevails, in savage and half-savage nations, and is
the chief cause which prevents such nations from making advances towards
civilization. Thousands of deys, of beys, of pachas, of rajahs, of
nabobs, have shown themselves as great masters of statecraft as the
members of the Committee of Public Safety. Djezzar, we imagine, was
superior to any of them in their new line. In fact, there is not a petty
tyrant in Asia or Africa so dull or so unlearned as not to be fully
qualified for the business of Jacobin police and Jacobin finance. To
behead people by scores without caring whether they are guilty or
innocent; to wring money out of the rich by the help of jailers and
executioners; to rob the public creditor, and to put him to death if he
remonstrates; to take loaves by force out of the bakers' shops; to
clothe and mount soldiers by seizing on one man's wool and linen, and on
another man's horses and saddles, without compensation, is of all modes
of governing the simplest and most obvious. Of its morality we at
present say nothing. But surely it requires no capacity beyond that of a
barbarian or a child. By means like those which we have described, the
Committee of Public Safety undoubtedly succeeded, for a short time, in
enforcing profound submission and in raising immense funds. But to
enforce submission by butchery, and to raise funds by spoliation, is not
statesmanship. The real statesman is he who, in troubled times, keeps
down the turbulent without unnecessarily harassing the well-affected;
and who, when great pecuniary resources are needed, provides for the
public exigencies without violating the security of property and drying
up the sources of future prosperity. Such a statesman, we are confident,
might, in 1793, have preserved the independence of France without
shedding a drop of innocent blood, without plundering a single
warehouse. Unhappily, the Republic was subject to men who were mere
demagogues and in no sense statesmen. They could declaim at a club. They
could lead a rabble to mischief. But they had no skill to conduct the
affairs of an empire. The want of skill they supplied for a time by
atrocity and blind violence. For legislative ability, fiscal ability,
military ability, diplomatic ability, they had one substitute, the
guillotine. Indeed, their exceeding ignorance and the barrenness of
their invention are the best excuse for their murders and robberies. We
really believe that they would not have cut so many throats, and picked
so many pockets, if they had known how to govern in any other way.
That under their administration the war against the European Coalition
was successfully conducted is true. But that war had been successfully
conducted before their elevation, and continued to be successfully
conducted after their fall. Terror was not the order of the day when
Brussels opened its gates to Dumourier. Terror had ceased to be the
order of the day when Piedmont and Lombardy were conquered by Bonaparte.
The truth is, that France was saved, not by the Committee of Public
Safety, but by the energy, patriotism, and valor of the French people.
Those high qualities were victorious in spite of the incapacity of
rulers whose administration was a tissue, not merely of crimes, but of
blunders.
We have not time to tell how the leaders of the savage faction at length
began to avenge mankind on each other; how the craven Hebert was dragged
wailing and trembling to his doom; how the nobler Danton, moved by a
late repentance, strove in vain to repair the evil which he had wrought,
and half redeemed the great crime of September by manfully encountering
death in the cause of mercy.
Our business is with Barere. In all those things he was not only
consenting, but eagerly and joyously forward. Not merely was he one of
the guilty administration. He was the man to whom was especially
assigned the office of proposing and defending outrages on justice and
humanity, and of furnishing to atrocious schemes an appropriate garb of
atrocious rodomontade. Barere first proclaimed from the tribune of the
Convention that terror must be the order of the day. It was by Barere
that the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris was provided with the aid of a
public accuser worthy of such a court, the infamous Fouquier Tinville.
It was Barere who, when one of the old members of the National Assembly
had been absolved by the Revolutionary Tribunal, gave orders that a
fresh jury should be summoned. "Acquit one of the National Assembly!" he
cried. "The Tribunal is turning against the Revolution." It is
unnecessary to say that the prisoner's head was soon in the basket. It
was Barere who moved that the city of Lyons should be destroyed. "Let
the plough," he cried from the tribune, "pass over her. Let her name
cease to exist. The rebels are conquered; but are they all exterminated?
No weakness. No mercy. Let every one be smitten. Two words will suffice
to tell the whole. Lyons made war on liberty; Lyons is no more." When
Toulon was taken Barere came forward to announce the event. "The
conquest," said the apostate Brissotine, "won by the Mountain over the
Brissotines must be commemorated by a mark set on the place where Toulon
once stood. The national thunder must crush the house of every trader
in the town." When Camille Desmoulins, long distinguished among the
republicans by zeal and ability, dared to raise his eloquent voice
against the Reign of Terror, and to point out the close analogy between
the government which then oppressed France and the government of the
worst of the Caesars, Barere rose to complain of the weak compassion
which tried to revive the hopes of the aristocracy. "Whoever," he said,
"is nobly born is a man to be suspected. Every priest, every frequenter
of the old court, every lawyer, every banker, is a man to be suspected.
Every person who grumbles at the course which the Revolution takes is a
man to be suspected. There are whole castes already tried and condemned.
There are callings which carry their doom with them. There are relations
of blood which the law regards with an evil eye. Republicans of
France!" yelled the renegade Girondist, the old enemy of the
Mountain,--"Republicans of France! the Brissotines led you by gentle
means to slavery. The Mountain leads you by strong measures to freedom.
Oh! who can count the evils which a false compassion may produce?" When
the friends of Danton mustered courage to express a wish that the
Convention would at least hear him in his own defence before it sent him
to certain death, the voice of Barere was the loudest in opposition to
their prayer. When the crimes of Lebon, one of the worst, if not the
very worst, of the vicegerents of the Committee of Public Safety, had so
maddened the people of the Department of the North that they resorted to
the desperate expedient of imploring the protection of the Convention,
Barere pleaded the cause of the accused tyrant, and threatened the
petitioners with the utmost vengeance of the government. "These
charges," he said, "have been suggested by wily aristocrats. The man who
crushes the enemies of the people, though he may be hurried by his zeal
into some excesses, can never be a proper object of censure. The
proceedings of Lebon may have been a little harsh as to form." One of
the small irregularities thus gently censured was this: Lebon kept a
wretched man a quarter of an hour under the knife of the guillotine, in
order to torment him, by reading to him, before he was dispatched, a
letter, the contents of which were supposed to be such as would
aggravate even the bitterness of death. "But what," proceeded Barere,
"is not permitted to the hatred of a republican against aristocracy? How
many generous sentiments atone for what may perhaps seem acrimonious in
the prosecution of public enemies? Revolutionary measures are always to
be spoken of with respect. Liberty is a virgin whose veil it is not
lawful to lift."