THE GOVERNMENT OF THE CONVENTION
1. The activity of the Clubs and the Commune during the
Convention.
During the whole of its existence the Convention was governed by
the leaders of the clubs and of the Commune.
We have already seen what was their influence on the preceding
Assemblies. It became overwhelming during the Convention. The
history of this latter is in reality that of the clubs and the
Commune which dominated it. They enslaved, not only the
Convention, but also all France. Numerous little provincial
clubs, directed by that of the capital, supervised magistrates,
denounced suspects, and undertook the execution of all the
revolutionary orders.
When the clubs or the Commune had decided upon certain measures
they had them voted by the Assembly then and there. If the
Assembly resisted, they sent their armed delegations thither--
that is, armed bands recruited from the scum of the populace.
They conveyed injunctions which were always slavishly obeyed.
The Commune was so sure of its strength that it even demanded of
the Convention the immediate expulsion of deputies who displeased
it.
While the Convention was composed generally of educated
men, the members of the Commune and the clubs comprised a
majority of small shopkeepers, labourers, and artisans, incapable
of personal opinions, and always guided by their leaders--Danton,
Camille Desmoulins, Robespierre, &c.
Of the two powers, clubs and insurrectionary Commune, the latter
exercised the greater influence in Paris, because it had made for
itself a revolutionary army. It held under its orders forty-
eight committees of National Guards, who asked nothing more than
to kill, sack, and, above all, plunder.
The tyranny with which the Commune crushed Paris was frightful.
For example, it delegated to a certain cobbler, Chalandon by
name, the right of surveillance over a portion of the capital--a
right implying the power to send to the Revolutionary Tribunal,
and therefore to the guillotine, all those whom he suspected.
Certain streets were thus almost depopulated by him.
The Convention struggled feebly against the Commune at the
outset, but did not prolong its resistance. The culminating
point of the conflict occurred when the Convention wished to
arrest Hebert, the friend of the Commune, and the latter sent
armed bands who threatened the Assembly and demanded the
expulsion of the Girondists who had provoked the measure. Upon
the Convention refusing the Commune besieged it on June 2, 1798,
by means of its revolutionary army, which was under the orders of
Hanriot. Terrified, the Assembly gave up twenty-seven of its
members. The Commune immediately sent a delegation ironically to
felicitate it upon its obedience.
After the fall of the Girondists the Convention submitted itself
completely to the injunctions of the omnipotent Commune. The
latter decreed the levy of a revolutionary army, to be
accompanied by a tribunal and a guillotine, which was to traverse
the whole of France in order to execute suspects.
Only towards the end of its existence, after the fall of
Robespierre, did the Convention contrive to escape from the yoke
of the Jacobins and the Commune. It closed the Jacobin club and
guillotined its leading members.
Despite such sanctions the leaders still continued to excite the
populace and hurl it against the Convention. In Germinal and
Prairial it underwent regular sieges. Armed delegations even
succeeded in forcing the Convention to vote the re-establishment
of the Commune and the convocation of a new Assembly, a measure
which the Convention hastened to annul the moment the insurgents
had withdrawn. Ashamed of its fear, it sent for regiments which
disarmed the faubourgs and made nearly ten thousand arrests.
Twenty-six leaders of the movement were put to death, and six
deputies who were concerned in the riot were guillotined.
But the Convention did not resist to any purpose. When it was no
longer led by the clubs and the Commune it obeyed the Committee
of Public Safety and voted its decrees without discussion.
``The Convention,'' writes H. Williams, ``which spoke of nothing
less than having all the princes and kings of Europe brought to
its feet loaded with chains, was made prisoner in its own
sanctuary by a handful of mercenaries.''
2. The Government of France during the Convention--The Terror.
As soon as it assembled in 1792 the Convention began by decreeing
the abolition of royalty, and in spite of the hesitation of a
great number of its members, who knew that the provinces were
royalist, it proclaimed the Republic.
Intimately persuaded that such a proclamation would transform the
civilised world, it instituted a new era and a new calendar. The
year I. of this era marked the dawn of a world in which reason
alone was to reign. It was inaugurated by the trial of Louis
XVI., a measure which was ordered by the Commune, but which the
majority of the Convention did not desire.
At its outset, in fact, the Convention was governed by its
relatively moderate elements, the Girondists. The president and
the secretaries had been chosen among the best known of this
party. Robespierre, who was later to become the absolute master
of the Convention, possessed so little influence at this time
that he obtained only six votes for the presidency, while
Petion received two hundred and thirty-five.
The Montagnards had at first only a very slight influence. Their
power was of later growth. When they were in power there was no
longer room in the Convention for moderate members.
Despite their minority the Montagnards found a way to force the
Assembly to bring Louis to trial. This was at once a victory
over the Girondists, the condemnation of all kings, and a final
divorce between the old order and the new.
To bring about the trial they manoeuvred very skilfully,
bombarding the Convention with petitions from the provinces, and
sending a deputation from the insurrectional Commune of Paris,
which demanded a trial.
According to a characteristic common to the Assemblies of the
Revolution, that of yielding to threats and always doing the
contrary of what they wished, the men of the Convention dared not
resist. The trial was decided upon.
The Girondists, who individually would not have wished for the
death of the king, voted for it out of fear once they were
assembled. Hoping to save his own head, the Duc d'Orleans,
Louis' cousin, voted with them. If, on mounting the scaffold on
January 21, 1793, Louis had had that vision of the future which
we attribute to the gods, he would have seen following him, one
by one, the greater number of the Girondists whose weakness had
been unable to defend him.
Regarded only from the purely utilitarian point of view, the
execution of the king was one of the mistakes of the Revolution.
It engendered civil war and armed Europe against France. In the
Convention itself his death gave rise to intestine struggles,
which finally led to the triumph of the Montagnards and the
expulsion of the Girondists.
The measures passed under the influence of the Montagnards
finally became so despotic that sixty departments, comprising the
West and the South, revolted. The insurrection, which was headed
by many of the expelled deputies, would perhaps have succeeded
had not the compromising assistance of the royalists caused men
to fear the return of the ancien regime. At Toulon, in fact, the
insurgents acclaimed Louis XVII.
The civil war thus begun lasted during the greater part of the
life of the Revolution. It was fought with the utmost savagery.
Old men, women, children, all were massacred, and villages and
crops were burned. In the Vendee alone the number of the killed
was reckoned at something between half a million and a million.
Civil war was soon followed by foreign war. The Jacobins thought
to remedy all these ills by creating a new Constitution. It was
always a tradition with all the revolutionary assemblies to
believe in the magic virtues of formula. In France this
conviction has never been affected by the failure of experiments.
``A robust faith,'' writes one of the great admirers of the
Revolution, M. Rambaud, ``sustained the Convention in this
labour; it believed firmly that when it had formulated in a law
the principles of the Revolution its enemies would be confounded,
or, still better, converted, and that the advent of justice would
disarm the insurgents.''
During its lifetime the Convention drafted two Constitutions--
that of 1793, or the year I., and that of 1795, or the year III.
The first was never applied, an absolute dictatorship very soon
replacing it; the second created the Directory.
The Convention contained a large number of lawyers and men of
affairs, who promptly comprehended the impossibility of
government by means of a large Assembly. They soon divided the
Convention into small committees, each of which had an
independent existence--business committees, committees of
legislation, finance, agriculture, arts, &c. These committees
prepared the laws which the Assembly usually voted with its eyes
closed.
Thanks to them, the work of the Convention was not purely
destructive. They drafted many very useful measures, creating
important colleges, establishing the metric system, &c. The
majority of the members of the Assembly, as we have already seen,
took refuge in these committees in order to evade the political
conflict which would have endangered their heads.
Above the business committees, which had nothing to do with
politics, was the Committee of Public Safety, instituted in
April, 1793, and composed of nine members. Directed at first by
Danton, and in the July of the same year by Robespierre, it
gradually absorbed all the powers of government, including that
of giving orders to ministers and generals. Carnot directed the
operations of the war, Cambon the finances, and Saint-Just and
Collot-d'Herbois the general policy.
Although the laws voted by the technical committees were often
very wise, and constituted the lasting work of the Convention,
those which the Assembly voted in a body under the threats of the
delegations which invaded it were manifestly ridiculous.
Among these laws, which were not greatly in the interests of the
public or of the Convention itself, were the law of the maximum,
voted in September, 1793, which pretended to fix the price of
provisions, and which merely established a continual dearth; the
destruction of the royal tombs at Saint-Denis; the trial
of the queen, the systematic devastation of the Vendee by
fire, the establishment of the Revolutionary Tribunal, &c.
The Terror was the chief means of government during the
Convention. Commencing in September, 1793, it reigned for six
months--that is, until the death of Robespierre. Vainly did
certain Jacobins-- Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Herault de
Sechelles, &c.--propose that clemency should be given a trial.
The only result of this proposition was that its authors were
sent to the scaffold. It was merely the lassitude of the public
that finally put an end to this shameful period.
The successive struggles of the various parties in the Convention
and its tendency towards extremes eliminated one by one the men
of importance who had once played their part therein. Finally it
fell under the exclusive domination of Robespierre. While the
Convention was disorganising and ravaging France, the armies were
winning brilliant victories. They had seized the left bank of
the Rhine, Belgium, and Holland. The treaty of Basle ratified
these conquests.
We have already mentioned, and we shall return to the matter
again, that the work of the armies must be considered absolutely
apart from that of the Convention. Contemporaries understood
this perfectly, but to-day it is often forgotten.
When the Convention was dissolved, in 1795, after lasting for
three years, it was regarded with universal distrust. The
perpetual plaything of popular caprice, it had not succeeded in
pacifying France, but had plunged her into anarchy. The
general opinion respecting the Convention is well summed up in a
letter written in July, 1799, by the Swedish charge
d'affaires, Baron Drinkmann: ``I venture to hope that no people
will ever be governed by the will of more cruel and imbecile
scoundrels than those that have ruled France since the beginning
of her new liberty.''
3. The End of the Convention. The Beginnings of the Directory.
At the end of its existence, the Convention, always trusting to
the power of formulae, drafted a new Constitution, that of the
year III., intended to replace that of 1793, which had never been
put into execution. The legislative power was to be shared by a
so-called Council of Ancients composed of 150 members, and a
council of deputies numbering 500. The executive power was
confided to a Directory of five members, who were appointed by
the Ancients upon nomination by the Five Hundred, and renewed
every year by the election of one of their number. It was
specified that two-thirds of the members of the new Assembly
should be chosen from among the deputies of the Convention. This
prudent measure was not very efficacious, as only ten departments
remained faithful to the Jacobins.
To avoid the election of royalists, the Convention had decided to
banish all emigres in perpetuity.
The announcement of this Constitution did not produce the
anticipated effect upon the public. It had no effect upon the
popular riots, which continued. One of the most important was
that which threatened the Convention on the 5th of October, 1795.
The leaders hurled a veritable army upon the Assembly.
Before such provocation, the Convention finally decided to defend
itself, and sent for troops, entrusting the command to Barras.
Bonaparte, who was then beginning to emerge from obscurity, was
entrusted with the task of repression. With such a leader action
was swift and energetic. Vigorously pounded with ball near the
church at St. Roch, the insurgents fled, leaving some hundreds of
dead on the spot.
This action, which displayed a firmness to which the Convention
was little habituated, was only due to the celerity of the
military operations, for while these were being carried out the
insurgents had sent delegates to the Assembly, which, as usual,
showed itself quite ready to yield to them.
The repression of this riot constituted the last important act of
the Convention. On the 26th of October, 1795, it declared its
mission terminated, and gave way to the Directory.
We have already laid stress upon some of the psychological
lessons furnished by the government of the Convention. One of
the most striking of these is the impotence of violence to
dominate men's minds in permanence.
Never did any Government possess such formidable means of action,
yet in spite of the permanent guillotine, despite the delegates
sent with the guillotine into the provinces, despite its
Draconian laws, the Convention had to struggle perpetually
against riots, insurrections, and conspiracies. The cities, the
departments, and the faubourgs of Paris were continually rising
in revolt, although heads were falling by the thousand.
This Assembly, which thought itself sovereign, fought against the
invincible forces which were fixed in men's minds, and which
material constraint was powerless to overcome. Of these hidden
motive forces it never understood the power, and it struggled
against them in vain. In the end the invisible forces triumphed.