INSTANCES OF REVOLUTIONARY VIOLENCE
1. Psychological Causes of Revolutionary Violence.
We have shown in the course of the preceding chapters that the
revolutionary theories constituted a new faith.
Humanitarian and sentimental, they exalted liberty and
fraternity. But, as in many religions, we can observe a complete
contradiction between doctrine and action. In practice no
liberty was tolerated, and fraternity was quickly replaced by
frenzied massacres.
This opposition between principles and conduct results from the
intolerance which accompanies all beliefs. A religion may be
steeped in humanitarianism and forbearance, but its sectaries
will always want to impose it on others by force, so that
violence is the inevitable result.
The cruelties of the Revolution were thus the inherent results of
the propagation of the new dogmas. The Inquisition, the
religious wars of France, St. Bartholomew's Day, the revocation
of the Edict of Nantes, the ``Dragonnades,'' the persecution of
the Jansenists, &c., belonged to the same family as the Terror
and derived from the same psychological sources.
Louis XIV. was not a cruel king, yet under the impulse of
his faith he drove hundreds of thousands of Protestants out of
France, after first shooting down a considerable number and
sending others to the galleys.
The methods of persuasion adopted by all believers are by no
means a consequence of their fear of the dissentient opposition.
Protestants and Jansenists were anything but dangerous under
Louis XIV. Intolerance arises above all from the indignation
experienced by a mind which is convinced that it possesses the
most dazzling verities against the men who deny those truths, and
who are surely not acting in good faith. How can one support
error when one has the necessary strength to wipe it out?
Thus have reasoned the believers of all ages. Thus reasoned
Louis XIV. and the men of the Terror. These latter also were
convinced that they were in possession of absolute truths, which
they believed to be obvious, and whose triumph was certain to
regenerate humanity. Could they be more tolerant toward their
adversaries than the Church and the kings of France had been
toward heretics?
We are forced to believe that terror is a method which all
believers regard as a necessity, since from the beginning of the
ages religious codes have always been based upon terror. To
force men to observe their prescriptions, believers have sought
to terrify them with threats of an eternal hell of torments.
The apostles of the Jacobin belief behaved as their fathers had
done, and employed the same methods. If similar events occurred
again we should see identical actions repeated. If a new
belief--Socialism, for example--were to triumph to-morrow, it
would be led to employ methods of propaganda like those of
the Inquisition and the Terror.
But were we to regard the Jacobin Terror solely as the result of
a religious movement, we should not completely apprehend it.
Around a triumphant religious belief, as we saw in the case of
the Reformation, gather a host of individual interests which are
dependent on that belief. The Terror was directed by a few
fanatical apostles, but beside this small number of ardent
proselytes, whose narrow minds dreamed of regenerating the world,
were great numbers of men who lived only to enrich themselves.
They rallied readily around the first victorious leader who
promised to enable them to enjoy the results of their pillage.
``The Terrorists of the Revolution,'' writes Albert Sorel,
``resorted to the Terror because they wished to remain in power,
and were incapable of doing so by other means. They employed it
for their own salvation, and after the event they stated that
their motive was the salvation of the State. Before it became a
system it was a means of government, and the system was only
invented to justify the means.''
We may thus fully agree with the following verdict on the Terror,
written by Emile Ollivier in his work on the Revolution: ``The
Terror was above all a Jacquerie, a regularised pillage, the
vastest enterprise of theft that any association of criminals has
ever organised.''
2. The Revolutionary Tribunals.
The Revolutionary Tribunals constituted the principal means of
action of the Terror. Besides that of Paris, created at the
instigation of Danton, and which a year afterwards sent
its founder to the guillotine, France was covered with
such tribunals.
``One hundred and seventy-eight tribunals,'' says Taine, ``of
which 40 were perambulant, pronounced death sentences in all
parts of the country, which were carried out instantly on the
spot. Between the 16th of April, 1793, and the 9th of Thermidor
in the year II. that of Paris guillotined 2,625 persons, and the
provincial judges worked as hard as those of Paris. In the
little town of Orange alone 331 persons were guillotined. In the
city of Arras 299 men and 93 women were guillotined. . . . In
the city of Lyons alone the revolutionary commissioner admitted
to 1,684 executions. . . . The total number of these murders has
been put at 17,000, among whom were 1,200 women, of whom a number
were octogenarians.''
Although the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris claimed only 2,625
victims, it must not be forgotten that all the suspects had
already been summarily massacred during the ``days'' of
September.
The Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris, a mere instrument of the
Committee of Public Safety, limited itself in reality, as
Fouquier-Tinville justly remarked during his trial, to executing
its orders. It surrounded itself at first with a few legal forms
which did not long survive. Interrogatory, defence, witnesses--
all were finally suppressed. Moral proof--that is, mere
suspicion--sufficed to procure condemnation. The president
usually contented himself with putting a vague question to the
accused. To work more rapidly still, Fouquier-Tinville proposed
to have the guillotine installed on the same premises as the
Tribunal.
This Tribunal sent indiscriminately to the scaffold all the
accused persons arrested by reason of party hatred, and very
soon, in the hands of Robespierre, it constituted an instrument
of the bloodiest tyranny. When Danton, one of its founders,
became its victim, he justly asked pardon of God and men, before
mounting the scaffold for having assisted to create such a
Tribunal.
Nothing found mercy before it: neither the genius of Lavoisier,
nor the gentleness of Lucile Desmoulins, nor the merit of
Malesherbes. ``So much talent,'' said Benjamin Constant,
``massacred by the most cowardly and brutish of men!''
To find any excuse for the Revolutionary Tribunal, we must return
to our conception of the religious mentality of the Jacobins, who
founded and directed it. It was a piece of work comparable in
its spirit and its aim to the Inquisition. The men who furnished
its victims--Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Couthon--believed
themselves the benefactors of the human race in suppressing all
infidels, the enemies of the faith that was to regenerate the
earth.
The executions during the Terror did not affect the members of
the aristocracy only, since 4,000 peasants and 3,000 working-men
were guillotined.
Given the emotion produced in Paris in our days by a capital
execution, one might suppose that the execution of so many
persons at one time would produce a very great emotion. But
habit had so dulled sensibility that people paid but little
attention to the matter at last. Mothers would take their
children to see people guillotined as to-day they take them to
the marionette theatre.
The daily spectacle of executions made the men of the time
very indifferent to death. All mounted the scaffold with perfect
tranquillity, the Girondists singing the Marseillaise as they
climbed the steps.
This resignation resulted from the law of habitude, which very
rapidly dulls emotion. To judge by the fact that royalist
risings were taking place daily, the prospect of the guillotine
no longer terrified men. Things happened as though the Terror
terrorised no one. Terror is an efficacious psychological
process so long as it does not last. The real terror resides far
more in threats than in their realisation.
3. The Terror in the Provinces.
The executions of the Revolutionary Tribunals in the provinces
represented only a portion of the massacres effected in the
departments during the Terror. The revolutionary army, composed
of vagabonds and brigands, marched through France killing and
pillaging. Its method of procedure is well indicated by the
following passage from Taine:--
``At Bedouin, a town of 2,000 inhabitants, where unknown hands
had cut down the tree of liberty, 433 houses were demolished or
fired, 16 persons were guillotined, and 47 shot down; all the
other inhabitants were expelled and reduced to living as
vagabonds in the mountains, and to taking shelter in caverns
which they hollowed out of the earth.''
The fate of the wretches sent before the Revolutionary Tribunals
was no better. The first mockery of trial was quickly
suppressed. At Nantes, Carrier drowned and shot down according
to his fancy nearly 5,000 persons--men, women, and children.
The details of these massacres figured in the Moniteur
after the reaction of Thermidor. I cite a few lines:--
``I saw,'' says Thomas, ``after the taking of Noirmoutier, men
and women and old people burned alive . . . women violated, girls
of fourteen and fifteen, and massacred afterward, and tender
babes thrown from bayonet to bayonet; children who were taken
from beside their mothers stretched out on the ground.''
In the same number we read a deposition by one Julien, relating
how Carrier forced his victims to dig their graves and to allow
themselves to be buried alive. The issue of October 15, 1794,
contained a report by Merlin de Thionville proving that the
captain of the vessel le Destin had received orders to embark
forty-one victims to be drowned--``among them a blind man of 78,
twelve women, twelve girls, and fourteen children, of whom ten
were from 10 to 6 and five at the breast.''
In the course of Carrier's trial (Moniteur, December 30, 1794)
it was proved that he ``had given orders to drown and shoot women
and children, and had ordered General Haxo to exterminate all the
inhabitants of La Vendee and to burn down their dwellings.''
Carrier, like all wholesale murderers, took an intense joy in
seeing his victims suffer. ``In the department in which I hunted
the priests,'' he said, ``I have never laughed so much or
experienced such pleasure as in watching their dying grimaces''
(Moniteur, December 22, 1794).
Carrier was tried to satisfy the reaction of Thermidor. But
the massacres of Nantes were repeated in many other towns.
Fouche slew more than 2,000 persons at Lyons, and so many were
killed at Toulon that the population fell from 29,000 to 7,000 in
a few months.
We must say in defence of Carrier, Freron, Fouche and all
these sinister persons, that they were incessantly stimulated by
the Committee of Public Safety. Carrier gave proof of this
during his trial.
``I admit,'' said he (Moniteur, December 24, 1794), ``that 150
or 200 prisoners were shot every day, but it was by order of the
commission. I informed the Convention that the brigands were
being shot down by hundreds, and it applauded this letter, and
ordered its insertion in the Bulletin. What were these deputies
doing then who are so furious against me now? They were
applauding. Why did they still keep me `on mission'? Because I
was then the saviour of the country, and now I am a bloodthirsty
man.''
Unhappily for him, Carrier did not know, as he remarked in the
same speech, that only seven or eight persons led the Convention.
But the terrorised Assembly approved of all that these seven or
eight ordered, so that they could say nothing in reply to
Carrier's argument. He certainly deserved to be guillotined, but
the whole Convention deserved to be guillotined with him, since
it had approved of the massacres.
The defence of Carrier, justified by the letters of the
Committee, by which the representatives ``on mission'' were
incessantly stimulated, shows that the violence of the Terror
resulted from a system, and not, as has sometimes been claimed,
from the initiative of a few individuals.
The thirst for destruction during the Terror was by no means
assuaged by the destruction of human beings only; there was an
even greater destruction of inanimate things. The true believer
is always an iconoclast. Once in power, he destroys with equal
zeal the enemies of his faith and the images, temples, and
symbols which recall the faith attacked.
We know that the first action of the Emperor Theodosius when
converted to the Christian religion was to break down the
majority of the temples which for six thousand years had been
built beside the Nile. We must not, therefore, be surprised to
see the leaders of the Revolution attacking the monuments and
works of art which for them were the vestiges of an abhorred
past.
Statues, manuscripts, stained glass windows, and plate were
frenziedly broken. When Fouche, the future Duke of Otranto
under Napoleon, and minister under Louis XVIII., was sent as
commissary of the Convention to the Nievre, he ordered the
demolition of all the towers of the chateaux and the
belfries of the churches ``because they wounded equality.''
Revolutionary vandalism expended itself even on the tomb.
Following a report read by Barrere to the Convention, the
magnificent royal tombs at Saint-Denis, among which was the
admirable mausoleum of Henri II., by Germain Pilon, were smashed
to pieces, the coffins emptied, and the body of Turenne sent to
the Museum as a curiosity, after one of the keepers had extracted
the teeth in order to sell them as curiosities. The moustache
and beard of Henri IV. were also torn out.
It is impossible to witness such comparatively enlightened
men consenting to the destruction of the artistic patriotism of
France without a feeling of sadness. To excuse them, we must
remember that intense beliefs give rise to the worst excesses,
and also that the Convention, almost daily invaded by rioters,
always yielded to the popular will.
This glowing record of devastation proves, not only the power of
fanaticism: it shows us what becomes of men who are liberated
from all social restraints, and of the country which falls into
their hands.