Meantime the convention continued to maintain the bold and commanding
front which they had so suddenly and critically assumed. Upon learning
the escape of the arrested deputies, and hearing of the insurrection at
the Hotel de Ville, they instantly passed a decree outlawing Robespierre
and his associates, inflicting a similar doom upon the mayor of Paris,
the procureur and other members of the commune, and charging twelve of
their members, the boldest who could be selected, to proceed with the
armed force to the execution of the sentence. The drums of the National
Guards now beat to arms in all the sections under authority of the
convention, while the tocsin continued to summon assistance with its
iron voice to Robespierre and the civic magistrates. Every thing
appeared to threaten a violent catastrophe, until it was seen clearly
that the public voice, and especially amongst the National Guards, was
declaring itself generally against the Terrorists.
The Hotel de Ville was surrounded by about fifteen hundred men, and
cannon turned upon the doors. The force of the assailants was weakest in
point of number, but their leaders were men of spirit, and night
concealed their inferiority of force.
The deputies commissioned for the purpose read the decree of the
assembly to those whom they found assembled in front of the city-hall,
and they shrunk from the attempt of defending it, some joining the
assailants, others laying down their arms and dispersing. Meantime the
deserted group of Terrorists within conducted themselves like scorpions,
which, when surrounded by a circle of fire, are said to turn their
stings on each other, and on themselves. Mutual and ferocious upbraiding
took place among these miserable men. "Wretch, were these the means you
promised to furnish?" said Payan to Henriot, whom he found intoxicated
and incapable of resolution or exertion; and seizing on him as he spoke,
he precipitated the revolutionary general from a window. Henriot
survived the fall only to drag himself into a drain, in which he was
afterwards discovered and brought out to execution. The younger
Robespierre threw himself from the window, but had not the good fortune
to perish on the spot. It seemed as if even the melancholy fate of
suicide, the last refuge of guilt and despair, was denied to men who had
so long refused every species of mercy to their fellow-creatures. Le Bas
alone had calmness enough to despatch himself with a pistol-shot. Saint
Just, after imploring his comrades to kill him, attempted his own life
with an irresolute hand, and failed, Couthon lay beneath the table
brandishing a knife, with which he repeatedly wounded his bosom, without
daring to add force enough to reach his heart. Their chief, Robespierre,
in an unsuccessful attempt to shoot himself, had only inflicted a
horrible fracture on his under-jaw.
In this situation they were found like wolves in their lair, foul with
blood, mutilated, despairing, and yet not able to die. Robespierre lay
on a table in an anti-room, his head supported by a deal-box, and his
hideous countenance half-hidden by a bloody and dirty cloth bound round
the shattered chin.[1]
[1] It did not escape the minute observers of this scene, that
he still held in his hand the bag which had contained the fatal
pistol, and which was inscribed with the words, _Au grand
monarque_, alluding to the sign, doubtless, of the gunsmith who
sold the weapon, but singularly applicable to the high
pretensions of the purchaser.
The captives were carried in triumph to the convention, who, without
admitting them to the bar, ordered them, as outlaws, for instant
execution. As the fatal cars passed to the guillotine, those who filled
them, but especially Robespierre, were overwhelmed with execrations from
the friends and relatives of victims whom he had sent on the same
melancholy road. The nature of his previous wound, from which the cloth
had never been removed till the executioner tore it off, added to the
torture of the sufferer. The shattered jaw dropped, and the wretch
yelled aloud, to the horror of the spectators.[2] A mask taken from that
dreadful head was long exhibited in different nations of Europe, and
appalled the spectator by its ugliness, and the mixture of fiendish
expression with that of bodily agony.
[2] The fate of no tyrant in history was so hideous at the
conclusion, excepting perhaps that of Jugurtha.
Thus fell Maximilian Robespierre, after having been the first person in
the French republic for nearly two years, during which time he governed
it upon the principles of Nero or Caligula. His elevation to the
situation which he held involved more contradictions than perhaps
attach to any similar event in history. A low-born and low-minded
tyrant was permitted to rule with the rod of the most frightful
despotism a people, whose anxiety for liberty had shortly before
rendered them unable to endure the rule of a humane and lawful
sovereign. A dastardly coward arose to the command of one of the bravest
nations in the world; and it was under the auspices of a man who dared
scarce fire a pistol, that the greatest generals in France began their
careers of conquest. He had neither eloquence nor imagination; but
substituted in their stead a miserable, affected, bombastic style,
which, until other circumstances gave him consequence, drew on him
general ridicule. Yet against so poor an orator, all the eloquence of
the philosophical Girondists, all the terrible powers of his associate
Danton, employed in a popular assembly, could not enable them to make an
effectual resistance. It may seem trifling to mention, that in a nation
where a good deal of prepossession is excited by amiable manners and
beauty of external appearance, the person who ascended to the highest
power was not only ill-looking, but singularly mean in person, awkward
and constrained in his address, ignorant how to set about pleasing even
when he most desired to give pleasure, and as tiresome nearly as he was
odious and heartless.
To compensate all these deficiencies, Robespierre had but an insatiable
ambition, founded on a vanity which made him think himself capable of
filling the highest situation; and therefore gave him daring, when to
dare is frequently to achieve. He mixed a false and over-strained, but
rather fluent species of bombastic composition, with the grossest
flattery to the lowest classes of the people; in consideration of which,
they could not but receive as genuine the praises which he always
bestowed on himself. His prudent resolution to be satisfied with
possessing the essence of power, without seeming to desire its rank and
trappings, formed another art of cajoling the multitude. His watchful
envy, his long-protracted but sure revenge, his craft, which to vulgar
minds supplies the place of wisdom, were his only means of competing
with his distinguished antagonists. And it seems to have been a merited
punishment of the extravagances and abuses of the French revolution,
that it engaged the country in a state of anarchy which permitted a
wretch such as we have described, to be for a long period master of her
destiny. Blood was his element, like that of the other Terrorists, and
he never fastened with so much pleasure on a new victim, as when he was
at the same time an ancient associate. In an epitaph, of which the
following couplet may serve as a translation, his life was represented
as incompatible with the existence of the human race:--
"Here lies Robespierre--let no tear be shed;
Reader, if he had lived, thou hadst been dead."
The commencement of the third volume introduces us to the family of
Bonaparte, who resided in the island of Corsica, which was, in ancient
times, remarkable as the scene of Seneca's exile, and in the last
century was distinguished by the memorable stand which the natives made
in defence of their liberties against the Genoese and French, during a
war which tended to show the high and indomitable spirit of the
islanders, united as it is with the fiery and vindictive feelings proper
to their country and climate.