ceased to fear them. He was all-powerful and at the height of glory;
they were weak and universally abhorred. He was a sovereign; and it is
probable that he already meditated a matrimonial alliance with
sovereigns. He was naturally unwilling, in his new position, to hold any
intercourse with the worst class of Jacobins. Had Barere's literary
assistance been important to the government, personal aversion might
have yielded to considerations of policy; but there was no motive for
keeping terms with a worthless man who had also proved a worthless
writer. Bonaparte, therefore, gave loose to his feelings. Barere was not
gently dropped, not sent into an honorable retirement, but spurned and
scourged away like a troublesome dog. He had been in the habit of
sending six copies of his journal on fine paper daily to the Tuileries.
Instead of receiving the thanks and praises which he expected, he was
dryly told that the great man had ordered five copies to be sent back.
Still he toiled on; still he cherished a hope that at last Napoleon
would relent, and that at last some share in the honors of the state
would reward so much assiduity and so much obsequiousness. He was
bitterly undeceived. Under the Imperial constitution the electoral
colleges of the departments did not possess the right of choosing
senators or deputies, but merely that of presenting candidates. From
among these candidates the Emperor named members of the senate, and the
senate named members of the legislative body. The inhabitants of the
Upper Pyrenees were still strangely partial to Barere. In the year 1805
they were disposed to present him as a candidate for the senate. On this
Napoleon expressed the highest displeasure; and the president of the
electoral college was directed to tell the voters, in plain terms, that
such a choice would be disgraceful to the department. All thought of
naming Barere a candidate for the senate was consequently dropped. But
the people of Argeles ventured to name him a candidate for the
legislative body. That body was altogether destitute of weight and
dignity; it was not permitted to debate; its only function was to vote
in silence for whatever the government proposed. It is not easy to
understand how any man, who had sat in free and powerful deliberative
assemblies, could condescend to bear a part in such a mummery. Barere,
however, was desirous of a place even in this mock legislature; and a
place even in this mock legislature was refused to him. In the whole
senate he had not a single vote.
Such treatment was sufficient, it might have been thought, to move the
most abject of mankind to resentment. Still, however, Barere cringed and
fawned on. His Letters came weekly to the Tuileries till the year 1807.
At length, while he was actually writing the two hundred and
twenty-third of the series, a note was put into his hands. It was from
Duroc, and was much more perspicuous than polite. Barere was requested
to send no more of his Reports to the palace, as the Emperor was too
busy to read them.
Contempt, says the Indian proverb, pierces even the shell of the
tortoise; and the contempt of the Court was felt to the quick even by
the callous heart of Barere. He had humbled himself to the dust; and he
had humbled himself in vain. Having been eminent among the rulers of a
great and victorious state, he had stooped to serve a master in the
vilest capacities; and he had been told that, even in those capacities,
he was not worthy of the pittance which had been disdainfully flung to
him. He was now degraded below the level even of the hirelings whom the
government employed in the most infamous offices. He stood idle in the
market-place, not because he thought any office too infamous, but
because none would hire him.
Yet he had reason to think himself fortunate; for, had all that is
avowed in these Memoirs been known, he would have received very
different tokens of the Imperial displeasure. We learn from himself
that, while publishing daily columns of flattery on Bonaparte, and while
carrying weekly budgets of calumny to the Tuileries, he was in close
connection with the agents whom the Emperor Alexander, then by no means
favorably disposed towards France, employed to watch all that passed at
Paris; was permitted to read their secret dispatches; was consulted by
them as to the temper of the public mind and the character of Napoleon;
and did his best to persuade them that the government was in a tottering
condition, and that the new sovereign was not, as the world supposed, a
great statesman and soldier. Next, Barere, still the flatterer and
talebearer of the Imperial Court, connected himself in the same manner
with the Spanish envoy. He owns that with that envoy he had relations
which he took the greatest pains to conceal from his own government;
that they met twice a day; and that their conversation chiefly turned on
the vices of Napoleon, on his designs against Spain, and on the best
mode of rendering those designs abortive. In truth, Barere's baseness
was unfathomable. In the lowest deeps of shame he found out lower deeps.
It is bad to be a sycophant; it is bad to be a spy. But even among
sycophants and spies there are degrees of meanness. The vilest sycophant
is he who privily slanders the master on whom he fawns; the vilest spy
is he who serves foreigners against the government of his native land.
From 1807 to 1814 Barere lived in obscurity, railing as bitterly as his
craven cowardice would permit against the Imperial administration, and
coming sometimes unpleasantly across the police. When the Bourbons
returned, he, as might have been expected, became a royalist, and wrote
a pamphlet setting forth the horrors of the system from which the
Restoration had delivered France, and magnifying the wisdom and goodness
which had dictated the charter. He who had voted for the death of Louis,
he who had moved the decree for the trial of Marie Antoinette, he whose
hatred of monarchy had led him to make war even upon the sepulchres of
ancient monarchs, assures us, with great complacency, that "in this work
monarchical principles and attachment to the House of Bourbon are nobly
expressed." By this apostasy he got nothing, not even any additional
infamy; for his character was already too black to be blackened.
During the hundred days he again emerged for a very short time into
public life; he was chosen by his native district a member of the
Chamber of Representatives. But, though that assembly was composed in a
great measure of men who regarded the excesses of the Jacobins with
indulgence, he found himself an object of general aversion. When the
President first informed the Chamber that M. Barere requested a hearing,
a deep and indignant murmur ran round the benches. After the battle of
Waterloo, Barere proposed that the Chamber should save France from the
victorious enemy, by putting forth a proclamation about the pass of
Thermopylae and the Lacedaemonian custom of wearing flowers in times of
extreme danger. Whether this composition, if it had then appeared, would
have stopped the English and Prussian armies, is a question respecting
which we are left to conjecture. The Chamber refused to adopt this last
of the Carmagnoles.
The Emperor had abdicated. The Bourbons returned. The Chamber of
Representatives, after burlesquing during a few weeks the proceedings of
the National Convention, retired with the well-earned character of
having been the silliest political assembly that had met in France.
Those dreaming pedants and praters never for a moment comprehended their
position. They could never understand that Europe must be either
conciliated or vanquished; that Europe could be conciliated only by the
restoration of Louis, and vanquished only by means of a dictatorial
power entrusted to Napoleon. They would not hear of Louis; yet they
would not hear of the only measures which could keep him out. They
incurred the enmity of all foreign powers by putting Napoleon at their
head; yet they shackled him, thwarted him, quarrelled with him about
every trifle, abandoned him on the first reverse. They then opposed
declamations and disquisitions to eight hundred thousand bayonets;
played at making a constitution for their country, when it depended on
the indulgence of the victor whether they should have a country; and
were at last interrupted, in the midst of their babble about the rights
of man and the sovereignty of the people, by the soldiers of Wellington
and Blucher.
A new Chamber of Deputies was elected, so bitterly hostile to the
Revolution that there was no small risk of a new Reign of Terror. It is
just, however, to say that the king, his ministers, and his allies
exerted themselves to restrain the violence of the fanatical royalists,
and that the punishments inflicted, though in our opinion unjustifiable,
were few and lenient when compared with those which were demanded by M.
de Labourdonnaye and M. Hyde de Neuville. We have always heard, and are
inclined to believe, that the government was not disposed to treat even
the regicides with severity. But on this point the feeling of the
Chamber of Deputies was so strong that it was thought necessary to make
some concession. It was enacted, therefore, that whoever, having voted
in January, 1793, for the death of Louis the Sixteenth, had in any
manner given in an adhesion to the government of Bonaparte during the
hundred days should be banished for life from France. Barere fell within
this description. He had voted for the death of Louis; and he had sat in
the Chamber of Representatives during the hundred days.
He accordingly retired to Belgium, and resided there, forgotten by all
mankind, till the year 1830. After the revolution of July he was at
liberty to return to France; and he fixed his residence in his native
province. But he was soon involved in a succession of lawsuits with his
nearest relations--"three fatal sisters and an ungrateful brother," to
use his own words. Who was in the right is a question about which we
have no means of judging, and certainly shall not take Barere's word.
The Courts appear to have decided some points in his favor and some
against him. The natural inference is, that there were faults on all
sides. The result of this litigation was that the old man was reduced to
extreme poverty, and was forced to sell his paternal house.
As far as we can judge from the few facts which remain to be mentioned,
Barere continued Barere to the last. After his exile he turned Jacobin
again, and, when he came back to France, joined the party of the extreme
left in railing at Louis Philippe, and at all Louis Philippe's
ministers. M. Casimir Perier, M. de Broglie, M. Guizot, and M. Thiers,
in particular, are honored with his abuse; and the King himself is held
up to execration as a hypocritical tyrant. Nevertheless Barere had no
scruple about accepting a charitable donation of a thousand francs a
year from the privy purse of the sovereign whom he hated and reviled.
This pension, together with some small sums occasionally doled out to
him by the Department of the Interior, on the ground that he was a
distressed man of letters, and by the Department of Justice, on the
ground that he had formerly held a high judicial office, saved him from
the necessity of begging his bread. Having survived all his colleagues
of the renowned Committee of Public Safety, and almost all his
colleagues of the Convention, he died in January, 1841. He had attained
his eighty-sixth year.
We have now laid before our readers what we believe to be a just account
of this man's life. Can it be necessary for us to add anything for the
purpose of assisting their judgment of his character? If we were writing
about any of his colleagues in the Committee of Public Safety,--about
Carnot, about Robespierre, or St. Just, nay, even about Couthon, Collot,
or Billaud,--we might feel it necessary to go into a full examination
of the arguments which have been employed to vindicate or to excuse the
system of Terror. We could, we think, show that France was saved from
her foreign enemies, not by the system of Terror, but in spite of it;
and that the perils which were made the plea of the violent policy of
the Mountain were to a great extent created by that very policy. We
could, we think, also show that the evils produced by the Jacobin
administration did not terminate when it fell; that it bequeathed a long
series of calamities to France and to Europe; that public opinion, which
had during two generations been constantly becoming more and more
favorable to civil and religious freedom, underwent, during the days of
Terror, a change of which the traces are still to be distinctly
perceived. It was natural that there should be such a change, when men
saw that those who called themselves the champions of popular rights,
had compressed into the space of twelve months more crimes than the
Kings of France, Merovingian, Carlovingian, and Capetian, had
perpetrated in twelve centuries. Freedom was regarded as a great
delusion. Men were willing to submit to the government of hereditary
princes, of fortunate soldiers, of nobles, of priests; to any government
but that of philosophers and philanthropists. Hence the Imperial
despotism, with its enslaved press and its silent tribune, its dungeons
stronger than the old Bastile, and its tribunals more obsequious than
the old Parliaments. Hence the restoration of the Bourbons and of the
Jesuits, the Chamber of 1815 with its categories of proscription, the
revival of the feudal spirit, the encroachments of the clergy, the
persecution of the Protestants, the appearance of a new breed of De
Montforts and Dominics in the full light of the nineteenth century.
Hence the admission of France into the Holy Alliance, and the war waged
by the old soldiers of the tricolor against the liberties of Spain.
Hence, too, the apprehensions with which, even at the present day, the
most temperate plans for widening the narrow basis of the French
representation are regarded by those who are especially interested in
the security of property and the maintenance of order. Half a century
has not sufficed to obliterate the stain which one year of depravity and
madness has left on the noblest of causes.
Nothing is more ridiculous than the manner in which writers like M.
Hippolyte Carnot defend or excuse the Jacobin administration, while they
declaim against the reaction which followed. That the reaction has
produced, and is still producing, much evil is perfectly true. But what
produced the reaction? The spring flies up with a force proportioned to
that with which it has been pressed down. The pendulum which is drawn
far in one direction swings as far in the other. The joyous madness of
intoxication in the evening is followed by languor and nausea on the
morrow. And so, in politics, it is the sure law that every excess shall
generate its opposite; nor does he deserve the name of a statesman who
strikes a great blow without fully calculating the effect of the
rebound. But such calculation was infinitely beyond the reach of the
authors of the Reign of Terror. Violence, and more violence, blood, and
more blood, made up their whole policy. In a few months these poor
creatures succeeded in bringing about a reaction, of which none of them
saw, and of which none of us may see, the close; and, having brought it
about, they marvelled at it: they bewailed it; they execrated it; they
ascribed it to everything but the real cause--their own immorality and
their own profound incapacity for the conduct of great affairs.
These, however, are considerations to which, on the present occasion, it
is hardly necessary for us to advert; for, be the defence which has been
set up for the Jacobin policy good or bad, it is a defence which cannot
avail Barere. From his own life, from his own pen, from his own mouth,
we can prove that the part which he took in the work of blood is to be
attributed, not even to sincere fanaticism, not even to misdirected and
ill-regulated patriotism, but either to cowardice, or to delight in
human misery. Will it be pretended that it was from public spirit that
he murdered the Girondists? In these very Memoirs he tells us that he
always regarded their death as the greatest calamity that could befall
France. Will it be pretended that it was from public spirit that he
raved for the head of the Austrian woman? In these very Memoirs he tells
us that the time spent in attacking her was ill spent, and ought to have
been employed in concerting measures of national defence. Will it be
pretended that he was induced by sincere and earnest abhorrence of
kingly government to butcher the living and to outrage the dead; he who
invited Napoleon to take the title of King of Kings, he who assures us
that after the Restoration he expressed in noble language his attachment
to monarchy, and to the House of Bourbon? Had he been less mean,
something might have been said in extenuation of his cruelty. Had he
been less cruel, something might have been said in extenuation of his
meanness. But for him, regicide and court spy, for him who patronized
Lebon and betrayed Demerville, for him who wantoned alternately in
gasconades of Jacobinism and gasconades of servility, what excuse has
the largest charity to offer.
We cannot conclude without saying something about two parts of his
character, which his biographer appears to consider as deserving of high
admiration. Barere, it is admitted, was somewhat fickle: but in two
things he was consistent, in his love of Christianity, and in his hatred
to England. If this were so, we must say that England is much more
beholden to him than Christianity.
It is possible that our inclinations may bias our judgment; but we think
that we do not flatter ourselves when we say that Barere's aversion to
our country was a sentiment as deep and constant as his mind was capable
of entertaining. The value of this compliment is indeed somewhat
diminished by the circumstance that he knew very little about us. His
ignorance of our institutions, manners, and history is the less
excusable, because, according to his own account, he consorted much,
during the peace of Amiens, with Englishmen of note, such as that
eminent nobleman Lord Greaten, and that not less eminent philosopher Mr.
Mackenzie Coefhis. In spite, however, of his connection with these
well-known ornaments of our country, he was so ill-informed about us as
to fancy that our government was always laying plans to torment him. If
he was hooted at Saintes, probably by people whose relations he had
murdered, it was because the cabinet of St. James's had hired the mob.
If nobody would read his bad books, it was because the cabinet of St.
James's had secured the Reviewers. His accounts of Mr. Fox, of Mr. Pitt,
of the Duke of Wellington, of Mr. Canning, swarm with blunders
surpassing even the ordinary blunders committed by Frenchmen who write
about England. Mr. Fox and Mr. Pitt, he tells us, were ministers in two
different reigns. Mr. Pitt's sinking fund was instituted in order to
enable England to pay subsidies to the powers allied against the French
republic. The Duke of Wellington's house in Hyde Park was built by the
nation, which twice voted the sum of 200,000L for the purpose. This,
however, is exclusive of the cost of the frescoes, which were also paid
for out of the public purse. Mr. Canning was the first Englishman whose
death Europe had reason to lament; for the death of Lord Ward, a
relation, we presume, of Lord Greaten and Mr. Coefhis, had been an
immense benefit to mankind.
Ignorant, however, as Barere was, he knew enough of us to hate us; and
we persuade ourselves that, had he known us better, he would have hated
us more. The nation which has combined, beyond all example and all hope,
the blessings of liberty with those of order, might well be an object of
aversion to one who had been false alike to the cause of order and to
the cause of liberty. We have had amongst us intemperate zeal for
popular rights; we have had amongst us also the intemperance of loyalty.
But we have never been shocked by such a spectacle as the Barere of
1794, or as the Barere of 1804. Compared with him, our fiercest
demagogues have been gentle; compared with him, our meanest courtiers
have been manly. Mix together Thistlewood and Bubb Dodington, and you
are still far from having Barere. The antipathy between him and us is
such, that neither for the crimes of his earlier nor for those of his
later life does our language, rich as it is, furnish us with adequate
names. We have found it difficult to relate his history without having
perpetual recourse to the French vocabulary of horror, and to the French
vocabulary of baseness. It is not easy to give a notion of his conduct
in the Convention, without using those emphatic terms, _guillotinade_,
_noyade_, _fusillade_, _mitraillade_. It is not easy to give a notion of
his conduct under the Consulate and the Empire without borrowing such
words as _mouchard_ and _mouton_.
We therefore like his invectives against us much better than anything
else that he has written; and dwell on them, not merely with
complacency, but with a feeling akin to gratitude. It was but little
that he could do to promote the honor of our country; but that little he
did strenuously and constantly. Renegade, traitor, slave, coward, liar,
slanderer, murderer, hack writer, police spy--the one small service
which he could render to England was to hate her; and such as he was may
all who hate her be!
We cannot say that we contemplate with equal satisfaction that fervent
and constant zeal for religion which, according to M. Hippolyte Carnot,
distinguished Barere; for, as we think that whatever brings dishonor on
religion is a serious evil, we had, we own, indulged a hope that Barere
was an atheist. We now learn, however, that he was at no time even a
skeptic, that he adhered to his faith through the whole Revolution, and
that he has left several manuscript works on divinity. One of these is a
pious treatise, entitled Of Christianity, and of its Influence. Another
consists of meditations on the Psalms, which will doubtless greatly
console and edify the Church.
This makes the character complete. Whatsoever things are false,
whatsoever things are dishonest, whatsoever things are unjust,
whatsoever things are impure, whatsoever things are hateful, whatsoever
things are of evil report, if there be any vice, and if there be any
infamy, all these things, we knew, were blended in Barere. But one thing
was still wanting; and that M. Hippolyte Carnot has supplied. When to
such an assemblage of qualities a high profession of piety is added, the
effect becomes overpowering. We sink under the contemplation of such
exquisite and manifold perfection; and feel, with deep humility, how
presumptuous it was in us to think of composing the legend of this
beatified athlete of the faith, St. Bertrand of the Carmagnoles.
Something more we had to say about him. But let him go. We did not seek
him out, and will not keep him longer. If those who call themselves his
friends had not forced him on our notice we should never have vouchsafed
to him more than a passing word of scorn and abhorrence, such as we
might fling at his brethren, Hebert and Fouquier Tinville, and Carrier
and Lebon. We have no pleasure in seeing human nature thus degraded. We
turn with disgust from the filthy and spiteful Yahoos of the fiction;
and the filthiest and most spiteful Yahoo of the fiction was a noble
creature when compared with the Barere of history. But what is no
pleasure M. Hippolyte Carnot has made a duty. It is no light thing that
a man in high and honorable public trust, a man who, from his
connections and position, may not unnaturally be supposed to speak the
sentiments of a large class of his countrymen, should come forward to
demand approbation for a life black with every sort of wickedness, and
unredeemed by a single virtue. This M. Hippolyte Carnot has done. By
attempting to enshrine this Jacobin carrion, he has forced us to gibbet
it; and we venture to say that, from the eminence of infamy on which we
have placed it, he will not easily take it down.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] Memoires de Bertrand Barere; publies par MM. Hippolyte Carnot,
Membre de la Chambre des Deputes, et David d'Angers, Membre de
l'Institut: precedes d'une Notice Historique par H. Carnot. 4 tomes.
Paris: 1843.
[15] O'Meara's Voice from St. Helena, ii. 170.
[16] Moniteur, second, seventh, and ninth of August, 1793.
[17] Vol. ii. p. 407.
[18] Moniteur, thirty-first of July, 1793, and Nonidi, first Decade of
Brumaire, in the year 2.
[19] See the Publiciste of the fourteenth of July, 1793. Marat was
stabbed on the evening of the thirteenth.
[20] M. Hippolyte Carnot does his best to excuse this decree. His abuse
of England is merely laughable. England has managed to deal with enemies
of a very different sort from either himself or his hero. One
disgraceful blunder, however, we think it right to notice.