POLITICAL COURTS
In the eye of philosophy, perhaps the most alluring and yet illusive of
all the phenomena presented by civilization is that which we have been
considering. Why should a type of mind which has developed the highest
prescience when advancing along the curve which has led it to
ascendancy, be stricken with fatuity when the summit of the curve is
passed, and when a miscalculation touching the velocity of the descent
must be destruction?
Although this phenomenon has appeared pretty regularly, at certain
intervals, in the development of every modern nation, I conceive its
most illuminating example to be that intellectual limitation of caste
which, during the French Revolution, led to the creation of those
political criminal tribunals which reached perfection with Robespierre.
When coolly examined, at the distance of a century, the Royalist
combination for the suppression of equality before the law, as finally
evolved in 1792, did not so much lack military intelligence, as it
lacked any approximate comprehension of the modern mind. The Royalists
proposed to reëstablish privilege, and to do this they were ready to
immolate, if necessary, their King and Queen, and all of their own order
who stayed at home to defend them. Indeed, speaking generally, they
valued Louis XVI, living, cheaply enough, counting him a more
considerable asset if dead. "What a noise it would make throughout
Europe," they whispered among themselves, "if the rabble should kill the
King."
Nor did Marie Antoinette delude herself on this score. At Pilnitz, in
1791, the German potentates issued a declaration touching France which
was too moderate to suit the emigrants, who published upon it a
commentary of their own. This commentary was so revolting that when the
Queen read her brother-in-law's signature appended to it, she
exclaimed--"Cain."
The Royalist plan of campaign was this: They reckoned the energy of the
Revolution so low that they counted pretty confidently, in the summer
of 1792, on the ability of their party to defend the Tuileries against
any force which could be brought against it; but assuming that the
Tuileries could not be defended, and that the King and Queen should be
massacred, they believed that their own position would be improved.
Their monarchical allies would be thereby violently stimulated. It was
determined, therefore, that, regardless of consequences to their
friends, the invading army should cross the border into Lorraine and,
marching by way of Sierk and Rodemach, occupy Châlons. Their entry into
Châlons, which they were confident could not be held against them,
because of the feeling throughout the country, was to be the signal for
the rising in Vendée and Brittany which should sweep down upon Paris
from the rear and make the capital untenable. At Châlons the allies
would be but ninety miles from Paris, and then nothing would remain but
vengeance, and vengeance the more complete the greater the crime had
been.
All went well with them up to Valmy. The German advance on August 11,
1792, reached Rodemach, and on August 19, the bulk of the Prussian army
crossed the frontier at Rédagne. On August 20, 1792, Longwy was
invested and in three days capitulated. In the camp of the Comte
d'Artois "there was not one of us," wrote Las Casas, "who did not see
himself, in a fortnight, triumphant, in his own home, surrounded by his
humbled and submissive vassals." At length from their bivouacs at
Saint-Remy and at Suippes the nobles saw in the distance the towers of
Châlons.
The panic at Châlons was so great that orders were given to cut the
bridge across the Marne, but it was not until about September 2, that
the whole peril was understood at Paris. It is true that for several
weeks the government had been aware that the West was agitated and that
Rouërie was probably conspiring among the Royalists and nonjuring
priests, but they did not appreciate the imminence of the danger. On
September 3, at latest, Danton certainly heard the details of the plot
from a spy, and it was then, while others quailed, that he incited Paris
to audacity. This was Danton's culmination.
As we look back, the weakness of the Germans seems to have been
psychological rather than physical. At Valmy the numbers engaged were
not unequal, and while the French were, for the most part, raw and
ill-compacted levies, with few trained officers, the German regiments
were those renowned battalions of Frederick the Great whose onset,
during the Seven Years' War, no adversary had been able to endure. Yet
these redoubtable Prussians fell back in confusion without having
seriously tried the French position, and their officers, apparently, did
not venture to call upon them to charge again. In vain the French
gentlemen implored the Prussian King to support them if they alone
should storm Kellermann's batteries. Under the advice of the Duke of
Brunswick the King decided on retreat. It is said that the Duke had as
little heart in the war as Charles Fox, or, possibly, Pitt, or as his
own troops. And yet he was so strong that Dumouriez, after his victory,
hung back and offered the invaders free passage lest the Germans, if
aroused, should turn on him and fight their way to the Marne.
To the emigrants the retreat was terrible. It was a disaster from which,
as a compact power, they never recovered. The rising in Vendée
temporarily collapsed with the check at Châlons, and they were left
literally naked unto their enemy. Some of them returned to their homes,
preferring the guillotine to starvation, others, disguised in peasants'
blouses, tried to reach Rouërie in La Vendée, some died from hardship,
some committed suicide, while the bulk regained Liège and there waited
as suppliants for assistance from Vienna. But these unfortunate men, who
had entered so gayly upon a conflict whose significance they could not
comprehend, had by this time lost more than lands and castles. Many of
them had lost wives and children in one of the most frightful butcheries
of history, and a butchery for which they themselves were responsible,
because it was the inevitable and logical effect of their own
intellectual limitations.
When, after the affair of August 10, Danton and his party became masters
of the incipient republic, Paris lay between two perils whose relative
magnitude no one could measure. If Châlons fell, Vendée would rise, and
the Republicans of the West would be massacred. Five months later Vendée
did rise, and at Machecoul the patriots were slaughtered amidst nameless
atrocities, largely at the instigation of the priests. In March, 1793,
one hundred thousand peasants were under arms.
Clearly the West could not be denuded of troops, and yet, if Châlons
were to be made good, every available man had to be hurried to
Kellermann, and this gigantic effort fell to the lot of a body of young
and inexperienced adventurers who formed what could hardly be dignified
with the name of an organized administration.
For a long time Marat, with whom Danton had been obliged to coalesce,
had been insisting that, if the enemy were to be resisted on the
frontier, Paris must first be purged, for Paris swarmed with Royalists
wild for revenge, and who were known to be arming. Danton was not yet
prepared for extermination. He instituted domiciliary visits. He made
about three thousand arrests and seized a quantity of muskets, but he
liberated most of those who were under suspicion. The crisis only came
with the news, on September 2, of the investment of Verdun, when no one
longer could doubt that the net was closing about Paris. Verdun was but
three or four days' march from Châlons. When the Duke of Brunswick
crossed the Marne and Brittany revolted, the government would have to
flee, as Roland proposed, and then the Royalists would burst the gates
of the prisons and there would be another Saint Bartholomew.
Toward four o'clock in the afternoon of September 2, 1792, the prison of
the Abbaye was forced and the massacres began. They lasted until
September 6, and through a circular sent out by Marat they were extended
to Lyons, to Reims, and to other cities. About 1600 prisoners were
murdered in Paris alone. Hardly any one has ever defended those
slaughters. Even Marat called them "disastrous," and yet no one
interfered. Neither Danton, nor Roland, nor the Assembly, nor the
National Guard, nor the City of Paris, although the two or three hundred
ruffians who did the work could have been dispersed by a single company
of resolute men, had society so willed it. When Robespierre's time came
he fell almost automatically. Though the head of the despotic "Committee
of Public Safety," and nominally the most powerful man in France, he was
sent to execution like the vilest and most contemptible of criminals by
adversaries who would not command a regiment. The inference is that the
September massacres, which have ever since been stigmatized as the
deepest stain upon the Revolution, were, veritably, due to the
Royalists, who made with the Republicans an issue of self-preservation.
For this was no common war. In Royalist eyes it was a servile revolt,
and was to be treated as servile revolts during the Middle Ages had
always been treated. Again and again, with all solemnity, the Royalists
had declared that were they to return as conquerors no stone of Paris
should be left standing on another, and that the inhabitants should
expire in the ashes of their homes on the rack and the wheel.
Though Danton had many and obvious weaknesses he was a good lawyer, and
Danton perceived that though he might not have been able to prevent the
September massacres, and although they might have been and probably were
inevitable under the tension which prevailed, yet that any court, even a
political court, would be better than Marat's mob. Some months later he
explained his position to the Convention when it was considering the
erection of the tribunal which finally sent Danton himself to the
scaffold. "Nothing is more difficult than to define a political crime.
But, if a simple citizen, for any ordinary crime, receives immediate
punishment, if it is so difficult to reach a political crime, is it not
necessary that extraordinary laws ... intimidate the rebels and reach
the culpable? Here public safety requires strong remedies and terrible
measures. I see no compromise between ordinary forms and a revolutionary
tribunal. History attests this truth; and since members have dared in
this assembly to refer to those bloody days which every good citizen has
lamented, I say that, if such a tribunal had then existed, the people
who have been so often and so cruelly reproached for them, would never
have stained them with blood; I say, and I shall have the assent of all
who have watched these movements, that no human power could have checked
the outburst of the national vengeance."
In this perversion of the courts lay, as I understand it, the foulest
horror of the French Revolution. It was the effect of the rigidity of
privilege, a rigidity which found its incarnation in the judiciary. The
constitutional decisions of the parliaments under the old régime would
alone have made their continuance impossible, but the worst evil was
that, after the shell crumbled, the mind within the shell survived, and
discredited the whole regular administration of justice. When the
National Assembly came to examine grievances it found protests against
the judicial system from every corner of France, and it referred these
petitions to a committee which reported in August, 1789. Setting aside
the centralization and consolidation of the system as being, for us,
immaterial, the committee laid down four leading principles of reform.
First, purchase of place should be abolished, and judicial office should
be recognized as a public trust. Second, judges should be confined to
applying, and restrained from interpreting, the law. That is to say, the
judges should be forbidden to legislate. Third, the judges should be
brought into harmony with public opinion by permitting the people to
participate in their appointment. Fourth, the tendency toward rigor in
criminal cases, which had become a scandal under the old régime, should
be tempered by the introduction of the jury. Bergasse proposed that
judicial appointments should be made by the executive from among three
candidates selected by the provincial assemblies. After long and very
remarkable debates the plan was, in substance, adopted in May, 1790,
except that the Assembly decided, by a majority of 503 to 450, that the
judges should be elected by the people for a term of six years, without
executive interference. In the debate Cazalès represented the
conservatives, Mirabeau the liberals. The vote was a test vote and shows
how strong the conservatives were in the Assembly up to the
reorganization of the Clergy in July, 1790, and the electoral assemblies
of the districts, which selected the judges, seem, on the whole, to have
been rather more conservative than the Assembly. In the election not a
sixth of those who were enfranchised voted for the delegates who, in
turn, chose the judges, and these delegates were usually either eminent
lawyers themselves, or wealthy merchants, or men of letters. The result
was a bench not differing much from an old parliament, and equally
incapable of understanding the convulsion about them.
Installed early in 1791, not a year elapsed before these magistrates
became as ill at ease as had been those whom they displaced, and in
March, 1792, Jean Debry formally demanded their recall, although their
terms properly were to expire in 1796. During the summer of 1792 they
sank into contempt and, after the massacres, the Legislative Assembly,
just before its dissolution, provided for a new constituency for the
judicial elections. This they degraded so far that, out of fifty-one
magistrates to be chosen in Paris, only twelve were professionally
trained. Nor did the new courts inspire respect. After the 10th of
August one or two special tribunals were organized to try the Swiss
Guard who surrendered in the Palace, and other political offenders, but
these proved to be so ineffective that Marat thrust them aside, and
substituted for them his gangs of murderers. No true and permanent
political court was evolved before Danton had to deal with the treason
of Dumouriez, nor was this tribunal perfected before Danton gave way to
the Committee of Public Safety, when French revolutionary society became
incandescent, through universal attack from without and through
insurrection within.
Danton, though an orator and a lawyer, possibly even a statesman, was
not competent to cope with an emergency which exacted from a minister
administrative genius like that of Carnot. Danton's story may be briefly
told. At once after Valmy the Convention established the Republic; on
January 21, 1793, Louis was beheaded; and between these two events a new
movement had occurred. The Revolutionists felt intuitively that, if they
remained shut up at home, with enemies without and traitors within, they
would be lost. If the new ideas were sound they would spread, and Valmy
had proved to them that those ideas had already weakened the invading
armies. Danton declared for the natural boundaries of France,--the
Rhine, the Alps, and the ocean,--and the Convention, on January 29,
1793, threw Dumouriez on Holland. This provoked war with England, and
then north, south, and east the coalition was complete. It represented
at least half a million fighting men. Danton, having no military
knowledge or experience, fixed his hopes on Dumouriez. To Danton,
Dumouriez was the only man who could save France. On November 6, 1792,
Dumouriez defeated the Austrians at Jemmapes; on the 14th, he entered
Brussels, and Belgium lay helpless before him. On the question of the
treatment of Belgium, the schism began which ended with his desertion.
Dumouriez was a conservative who plotted for a royal restoration under,
perhaps, Louis Philippe. The Convention, on the contrary, determined to
revolutionize Belgium, as France had been revolutionized, and to this
end Cambon proposed to confiscate and sell church land and emit
assignats. Danton visited Dumouriez to attempt to pacify him, but found
him deeply exasperated. Had Danton been more sagacious he would have
been suspicious. Unfortunately for him he left Dumouriez in command. In
February, Dumouriez invaded Holland and was repulsed, and he then fell
back to Brussels, not strong enough to march to Paris without support,
it is true, but probably expecting to be strong enough as soon as the
Vendean insurrection came to a head. Doubtless he had relations with the
rebels. At all events, on March 10, the insurrection began with the
massacre of Machecoul, and on March 12, 1793, Dumouriez wrote a letter
to the Convention which was equivalent to a declaration of war. He then
tried to corrupt his army, but failed, and on April 4, 1793, fled to
the Austrians. Meanwhile, La Vendée was in flames. To appreciate the
situation one must read Carnot's account of the border during these
weeks when he alone, probably, averted some grave disaster. For my
purpose it suffices to say that the pressure was intense, and that this
intense pressure brought forth the Revolutionary Tribunal, or the
political court.
On March 10, 1793, the Convention passed a decree constituting a court
of five judges and a jury, to be elected by the Convention. To these was
joined a public prosecutor. Fouquier-Tinville afterward attained to a
sombre fame in this position. Six members of the Convention were to sit
as a commission to supervise drawing the indictments, the preparation of
evidence, and also to advise the prosecutor. The punishments, under the
limitations of the Penal Code and other criminal laws, were to be within
the discretion of the court, whose judgments were to be final.[40] Death
was accompanied by confiscation of property.
Considering that this was an extraordinary tribunal, working under
extreme tension, which tried persons against whom usually the evidence
was pretty conclusive, its record for the first six months was not
discreditable. Between April 6 and September 21, 1793, it rendered
sixty-three sentences of death, thirteen of transportation, and
thirty-eight acquittals. The trials were held patiently, testimony was
heard, and the juries duly deliberated. Nevertheless the Terror deepened
as the stress upon the new-born republic increased. Nothing more awful
can be imagined than the ordeal which France endured between the meeting
of the Convention in September, 1792, and the completion of the
Committee of Public Safety in August, 1793. Hemmed in by enemies, the
revolution glowed in Paris like molten lava, while yet it was torn by
faction. Conservative opinion was represented by the Girondists, radical
opinion by the Mountain, and between the two lay the Plain, or the
majority of the Convention, who embodied the social centre of gravity.
As this central mass swayed, so did supremacy incline. The movement was
as accurate as that of any scientific instrument for registering any
strain. Dumouriez's treason in April left the northern frontier open,
save for a few fortresses which still held out. When those should fall
the enemy could make a junction with the rebels in Vendée. Still the
Girondists kept control, and even elected Isnard, the most violent among
them, President of the Convention. Then they had the temerity to arrest
a member of the Commune of Paris, which was the focus of radicalism.
That act precipitated the struggle for survival and with it came the
change in equilibrium. On June 2, Paris heard of the revolt of Lyons and
of the massacre of the patriots. The same day the Sections invaded the
Convention and expelled from their seats in the Tuileries twenty-seven
Girondists. The Plain or Centre now leant toward the Mountain, and, on
July 10, the Committee of Public Safety, which had been first organized
on April 6, 1793, directly after Dumouriez's treason, was reorganized by
the addition of men like Saint-Just and Couthon, with Prieur, a lawyer
of ability and energy, for President. On July 12, 1793, the Austrians
took Condé, and on July 28, Valenciennes; while on July 25, Kleber,
starving, surrendered Mayence. Nothing now but their own inertia stood
between the allies and La Vendée. Thither indeed Kellermann's men were
sent, since they had promised not to serve against the coalition for a
year, but even of these a division was surrounded and cut to pieces in
the disaster of Torfou. A most ferocious civil war soon raged throughout
France. Caen, Bordeaux, Lyons, Marseilles, declared against the
Convention. The whole of the northwest was drenched in blood by the
Chouans. Sixty departments were in arms. On August 28 the Royalists
surrendered Toulon to the English, who blockaded the coasts and supplied
the needs of the rebels. About Paris the people were actually starving.
On July 27 Robespierre entered the Committee of Safety; Carnot, on
August 14. This famous committee was a council of ten forming a pure
dictatorship. On August 16, the Convention decreed the _Levée en Masse_.
When Carnot became Minister of War to this dictatorship the Republic had
479,000 demoralized soldiers with the colors, under beaten and
discredited commanders. Bouillé had conspired against the
States-General, Lafayette against the Legislative Assembly, and
Dumouriez against the Convention. One year from that time it had a
superb force, 732,000 strong, commanded by Jourdan and Pichegru, Hoche,
Moreau, and Bonaparte. Above all Carnot loved Hoche. Up to Valmy the old
regular army, however shaken, had remained as a core. Then it became
merged in a mass of volunteers, and these volunteers had to be armed and
disciplined and fed and led against the greatest and strongest coalition
which the modern world had ever seen. France, under Camot, became a vast
workshop. Its most eminent scientific men taught the people how to
gather saltpetre and the government how to manufacture powder and
artillery. Horses had to be obtained. Carnot was as reckless of himself
as of others. He knew no rest. There was that to be done which had to be
done quickly and at any cost; there was that or annihilation.
On October 21, 1794, when the people had gathered in the Champ de Mars
to celebrate the Festival of Victories, after the President of the
Convention had proclaimed that the Republic had been delivered, Carnot
announced what had been accomplished.
France had won twenty-seven victories, of which eight had been pitched
battles.
One hundred and twenty lesser combats. France had killed eighty
thousand enemies.
Had taken ninety-one thousand prisoners.
Also one hundred and sixteen places or towns, six after siege.
Two hundred and thirty forts or redoubts.
Three thousand eight hundred cannon.
Seventy thousand muskets.
Ninety flags.
As Benjamin Constant has observed, nothing can change the stupendous
fact "that the Convention found the enemy at thirty leagues from Paris,
... and made peace at thirty leagues from Vienna."
Under the stimulus of a change in environment of mind is apt to expand
with something of this resistless energy. It did so in the Reformation.
It may be said almost invariably to do so, when decay does not
supervene, and it now concerns us to consider, in some rough way, what
the cost to the sinking class of attempting repression may be, when it
miscalculates its power in such an emergency.
I take it to be tolerably clear that, if the French privileged classes
had accepted the reforms of Turgot in good faith, and thus had spread
the movement of the revolution over a generation, there would have been
no civil war and no confiscations, save confiscations of ecclesiastical
property. I take it also that there would have been no massacres and no
revolutionary tribunals, if France in 1793 had fought foreign enemies
alone, as England did in 1688. Even as it was the courts did not grow
thoroughly political until the preservation of the new type of mind came
to hinge largely on the extermination of the old. Danton's first and
relatively benign revolutionary tribunal, established in March, 1793,
was reorganized by the Committee of Public Safety in the following
autumn, by a series of decrees of which the most celebrated is that of
September 17, touching suspected persons. By these decrees the tribunal
was enlarged so that, in the words of Danton, every day an aristocratic
head might fall. The committee presented a list of judges, and the
object of the law was to make the possession of a reactionary mind a
capital offence. It is only in extreme exigencies that pure thinking by
a single person becomes a crime. Ordinarily, a crime consists of a
malicious thought coupled with an overt act, but in periods of high
tension, the harboring of any given thought becomes criminal. Usually
during civil wars test oaths are tendered to suspected persons to
discover their loyalty. For several centuries the Church habitually
burnt alive all those who denied the test dogma of transubstantiation,
and during the worst spasm of the French Revolution to believe in the
principle of monarchy and privilege was made capital with confiscation
of property.
The question which the Convention had to meet was how to establish the
existence of a criminal mind, when nothing tangible indicated it. The
old régime had tortured. To prove heresy the Church also had always used
torture. The Revolution proceeded more mildly. It acted on suspicion.
The process was simple. The Committee, of whom in this department
Robespierre was the chief, made lists of those who were to be condemned.
There came to be finally almost a complete absence of forms. No evidence
was necessarily heard. The accused, if inconvenient, was not allowed to
speak. If there were doubt touching the probability of conviction,
pressure was put upon the court. I give one or two examples: Scellier,
the senior associate judge of the tribunal, appears to have been a good
lawyer and a fairly worthy man. One day in February, 1794, Scellier was
at dinner with Robespierre, when Robespierre complained of the delays of
the court. Scellier replied that without the observance of forms there
could be no safety for the innocent. "Bah!" replied Robespierre,--"you
and your forms: wait; soon the Committee will obtain a law which will
suppress forms, and then we shall see." Scellier ventured no answer.
Such a law was drafted by Couthon and actually passed on 22 Prairial
(June 10, 1794), and yet it altered little the methods of
Fouquier-Tinville as prosecuting officer. Scellier having complained of
this law of Prairial to Saint-Just, Saint-Just replied that if he were
to report his words, or that he was flinching, to the Committee,
Scellier would be arrested. As arrest was tantamount to sentence of
death, Scellier continued his work.
Without reasoning the subject out logically from premise to conclusion,
or being, of course, capable of doing so in the mass, Frenchmen had
collectively received the intuition that everything must be endured for
a strong government, and that whatever obstructed that government must
be eliminated. For the process of elimination they used the courts.
Under the conditions in which they were placed by the domestic enemy,
they had little alternative. If a political party opposed the
Dictatorship in the Convention, that party must be broken down; if a man
seemed likely to become a rival for the Dictatorship, that man must be
removed; all who conspired against the Republic must be destroyed as
ruthlessly at home as on the battle-field. The Republic was insolvent,
and must have money, as it must have men. If the government needed men,
it took them,--all. If it needed money, and a man were rich, it did not
hesitate to execute him and confiscate his property. There are very
famous examples of all these phenomena strewn through the history of the
Terror.
The Girondists were liberals. They always had been liberals; they had
never conspired against the Republic; but they were impracticable. The
ablest of them, Vergniaud, complained before the Tribunal, that he was
being tried for what he thought, not for what he had done. This the
government denied, but it was true. Nay, more; he was tried not for
positive but for negative opinions, and he was convicted and executed,
and his friends were convicted and executed with him, because, had they
remained in the Convention, the Dictatorship, through their opposition,
would have lost its energy. Also the form of the conviction was shocking
in the extreme. The defence of these twenty-one men was, practically,
suppressed, and the jury were directed to bring in a verdict of guilty.
Still the prosecutions of the Girondists stopped here. When they
refrained from obstruction, they were spared.
Danton and his friends may have been, and probably were, whether
intentionally or by force of circumstances, a menace to the
Dictatorship. Either Robespierre or Danton had to be eliminated. There
was not room for both. On April 1, 1793, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and
others were arrested on a warrant signed by such men as Cambacérès,
Carnot, and Prieur. Carnot in particular was a soldier of the highest
character and genius. He would have signed no such warrant had he not
thought the emergency pressing. Nor was the risk small. Danton was so
popular and so strong before a jury that the government appears to have
distrusted even Fouquier-Tinville, for an order was given, and held in
suspense, apparently to Henriot, to arrest the President and the Public
Prosecutor of the Revolutionary Tribunal, on the day of Danton's trial.
Under such a stimulant Fouquier did his best, but he felt himself to be
beaten. Examining Cambon, Danton broke out: "Do you believe us to be
conspirators? Look, he laughs, he don't believe it. Record that he has
laughed." Fouquier was at his wits' end. If the next day the jury were
asked if they had heard enough, and they answered, "No," there would be
an acquittal, and then Fouquier's own head would roll into the basket.
Probably there might even be insurrection. Fouquier wrote to the
Committee that they must obtain from the Convention a decree silencing
the defence. So grave was the crisis felt to be that the decree was
unanimously voted. When Fouquier heard that the decree was on its way,
he said, with a sigh of relief,--"Faith, we need it." But when it was
read, Danton sprung to his feet, raging, declaring that the public cried
out treason upon it. The President adjourned the court while the hall
resounded with the protests of the defendants and the shouts of the
police as they tore the condemned from the benches which they clutched
and dragged them through the corridors toward the prison. They emerged
no more until they mounted the carts which took them to the scaffold.
Nor was it safe to hesitate if one were attached to this court. Fouquier
had a clerk named Paris-Fabricius. Now Paris had been a friend of Danton
and took his condemnation to heart. He even declined to sign the
judgment, which it was his duty to do. The next day, when he presented
himself to Fouquier, Fouquier looked at him sourly, and observed, "We
don't want men who reason here; we want business done." The following
morning Paris did not appear. His friends were disturbed, but he was not
to be found. He had been cast into a secret dungeon in the prison of the
Luxembourg.
So, if a man were too rich it might go hard with him.
Louis-Philippe-Joseph, Duc d'Orleans, afterward known as Égalité, was
one of the most interesting figures among the old nobility. The
great-great-great-grandson of Louis XIII, he was a distant cousin of
Louis XVI, and ranked as the first noble of France beyond the royal
family. His education had been unfortunate. His father lived with a
ballet-dancer, while his mother, the Princess Henriette de
Bourbon-Conti, scandalized a society which was not easily shocked.
During the Terror the sans culottes everywhere averred that the Duke was
the son of a coachman in the service of the banker Duruet. Doubtless
this was false, but the princess had abundant liaisons not much more
reputable. Left to himself at sixteen years old, Égalité led a life of
extreme profligacy, but he married one of the most beautiful and
charming women of the age, whom he succeeded in inspiring with a devoted
affection. Born in 1747, his father died in 1785, leaving him, just at
the outbreak of the Revolution, the master of enormous wealth, and the
father of three sons who adored him. The eldest of these was the future
king, Louis-Philippe. The man must have had good in him to have been
loved as he was throughout life. He was besides more intelligent
touching the Revolution and its meaning than any man approaching him in
rank in France. The Duke, when a young man, served with credit in the
navy, but after the battle of Ushant, in 1778, where he commanded the
blue squadron, he was received with such enthusiasm in Paris, that
Marie-Antoinette obtained his dismissal from the service. From this
period he withdrew from court and his opposition to the government
began. He adopted republican ideas, which he drew from America, and he
educated his children as democrats. In 1789 he was elected to the
States-General, where he supported the fusion of the orders, and
attained to a popularity which, on one occasion, according to Madame de
Campan, nearly made the Queen faint from rage and grief. It was from the
garden of his palace of the Palais Royal that the column marched on July
14, wearing his colors, the red, white and blue, to storm the Bastille.
It seemed that he had only to go on resolutely to thrust the King aside
and become the ruler of France. He made no effort to do so. Mirabeau is
said to have been disgusted with his lack of ambition. He was charitable
also, and spent very large sums of money among the poor of Paris during
the years of distress which followed upon the social disorders. The
breach with the court, however, became steadily wider, and finally he
adhered to the party of Danton and voted for the condemnation of the
King. He sent two of his sons to serve in the army. The elder was still
with Dumouriez at the time of his treason. On April 6, 1793, when
Dumouriez's treachery had become known, the Assembly ordered the arrest
of the whole Bourbon family, and among them the Duke was apprehended and
sent to Marseilles.
Thus it appears that whatever complaint his own order may have had
against Égalité, the Republic certainly had none. No man could have done
more for modern France than he. He abandoned his class, renounced his
name, gave his money, sent his sons to the war, and voted for his own
relative's death. No one feared him, and yet Robespierre had him brought
to Paris and guillotined. His trial was a form. Fouquier admitted that
he had been condemned before he left Marseilles. The Duke was, however,
very rich and the government needed his money. Every one understood the
situation. He was told of the order for his arrest one night when at
supper in his palace in Paris with his friend Monsieur de Monville. The
Duke, much moved, asked Monville if it were not horrible, after all the
sacrifices he had made and all that he had done. "Yes, horrible," said
Monville, coolly, "but what would you have? They have taken from your
Highness all they could get, you can be of no further use to them.
Therefore, they will do to you, what I do with this lemon" (he was
squeezing a lemon on a sole); "now I have all the juice." And he threw
the lemon into the fireplace. But yet even then Robespierre was not
satisfied. He harbored malice against this fallen man. On the way to the
scaffold he ordered the cart, in which the Duke sat, to stop before the
Palais Royal, which had been confiscated, in order that the Duke might
contemplate his last sacrifice for his country. The Duke showed neither
fear nor emotion.
All the world knows the story of the Terror. The long processions of
carts carrying victims to the guillotine, these increasing in number
until after the Law of Prairial they averaged sixty or seventy a day in
Paris alone, while in the provinces there was no end. At Nantes, Carrier
could not work fast enough by a court, so he sank boat loads of
prisoners in the Loire. The hecatombs sacrificed at Lyons, and the "Red
Masses" of Orange, have all been described. The population of Toulon
sank from 29,000 to 7,000. All those, in fine, were seized and slain
who were suspected of having a mind tinged with caste, or of being
traitors to the Republic. And it was the Centre, or the majority of the
Convention, who did this, by tacitly permitting it to be done. That is
to say, France permitted it because the onslaught of the decaying class
made atrocities such as these appear to be a condition of
self-preservation. I doubt if, in human history, there be such another
and so awful an illustration of the possible effects of conservative
errors of judgment.
For France never loved the Terror or the loathsome instruments, such as
Fouquier-Tinville, or Carrier, or Billaud-Varennes, or Collot-d'Herbois,
or Henriot, or Robespierre, or Couthon, who conducted it. On this point
there can, I think, be neither doubt nor question. I have tried to show
how the Terror began. It is easy to show how and why it ended. As it
began automatically by the stress of foreign and domestic war, so it
ended automatically when that stress was relieved. And the most curious
aspect of the phenomenon is that it did not end through the application
of force, but by common consent, and when it had ended, those who had
been used for the bloody work could not be endured, and they too were
put to death. The procession of dates is convincing.
When, on July 27, 1793, Robespierre entered the Committee of Public
Safety, the fortunes of the Republic were near their nadir, but almost
immediately, after Carnot took the War Department on August 14, they
began to mend. On October 8, 1793, Lyons surrendered; on December 19,
1793, the English evacuated Toulon; and, on December 23, the
insurrection in La Vendée received its death blow at Savenai. There had
also been success on the frontiers. Carnot put Hoche in command in the
Vosges. On December 23, 1793, Hoche defeated Wurmser at Freschweiller,
when the Austrians, abandoning the lines of Wissembourg, fell back
across the Rhine. Thus by the end of 1793, save for the great border
fortresses of Valenciennes and Condé to the north, which commanded the
road from Brussels to Paris, the soil of France had been cleared of the
enemy, and something resembling domestic tranquillity had been restored
at home. Simultaneously, as the pressure lessened, rifts began to appear
in the knot of men who held the Dictatorship in the Republic.
Robespierre, Couthon, and Saint-Just coalesced, and gained control of
the police, while Billaud-Varennes, Collot-d'Herbois, and, secretly and
as far as he dared, Barère, formed an opposition. Not that the latter
were more moderate or merciful than Robespierre, but because, in the
nature of things, there could be but one Dictator, and it became a
question of the survival of the fittest. Carnot took little or no part
in active politics. He devoted himself to the war, but he disapproved of
the Terror and came to a breach with Saint-Just. Robespierre's power
culminated on June 10, 1794, with the passage of the Law of 22 Prairial,
which put the life of every Frenchman in his hand, and after which, save
for some dozen or two of his most intimate and devoted adherents like
Saint-Just, Couthon, Le Bas, Fouquier, Fleuriot the Mayor of Paris, and
Henriot, the commander of the national guard, no one felt his head safe
on his shoulders. It needed but security on the northern frontier to
cause the social centre of gravity to shift and Robespierre to fall, and
security came with the campaign of Fleurus.
Jourdan and Pichegru were in command on the Belgian border, and on June
26, 1794, just sixteen days after the passage of the Law of Prairial,
Jourdan won the battle of Fleurus. This battle, though not decisive in
itself, led to decisive results. It uncovered Valenciennes and Condé,
which were invested, closing the entrance to France. On July 11, Jourdan
entered Brussels; on July 16, he won a crushing victory before Louvain
and the same day Namur opened its gates. On July 23, Pichegru, driving
the English before him, seized Antwerp. No Frenchman could longer doubt
that France was delivered, and with that certainty the Terror ended
without a blow. Eventually the end must have come, but it came
instantly, and, according to the old legend, it came through a man's
love for a woman.
John Lambert Tallien, the son of the butler of the Marquis of Bercy, was
born in 1769, and received an education through the generosity of the
marquis, who noticed his intelligence. He became a journeyman printer,
and one day in the studio of Madame Lebrun, dressed in his workman's
blouse, he met Thérézia Cabarrus, Marquise de Fontenay, the most
seductive woman of her time, and fell in love with her on the instant.
Nothing, apparently, could have been more hopeless or absurd. But the
Revolution came. Tallien became prominent, was elected to the
Convention, grew to be influential, and in September, 1793, was sent to
Bordeaux, as representative of the Chamber, or as proconsul, as they
called it. There he, the all-powerful despot, found Thérézia, trying to
escape to Spain, in prison, humble, poor, shuddering in the shadow of
the guillotine. He saved her; he carried her through Bordeaux in triumph
in a car by his side. He took her with him to Paris, and there
Robespierre threw her into prison, and accused Tallien of corruption. On
June 12 Robespierre denounced him to the Convention, and on June 14,
1794, the Jacobins struck his name from the list of the club. When
Fleurus was fought Thérézia lay in La Force, daily expecting death,
while Tallien had become the soul of the reactionary party. On the 8
Thermidor (July 26,1794) Tallien received a dagger wrapped in a note
signed by Thérézia,--"To-morrow they kill me. Are you then only a
coward?"[41]
On the morrow the great day had come. Saint-Just rose in the Convention
to read a report to denounce Billaud, Collot, and Camot. Tallien would
not let him be heard. Billaud followed him. Collot was in the chair.
Robespierre mounted the tribune and tried to speak. It was not without
reason that Thérézia afterwards said, "This little hand had somewhat to
do with overthrowing the guillotine," for Tallien sprang on him, dagger
in hand, and, grasping him by the throat, cast him from the tribune,
exclaiming, "I have armed myself with a dagger to pierce his heart if
the Convention dare not order his accusation." Then rose a great shout
from the Centre, "Down with the tyrant, arrest him, accuse him!" From
the Centre, which until that day had always silently supported the
Robespierrian Dictatorship. Robespierre for the last time tried to
speak, but his voice failed him. "It's Danton's blood that chokes him;
arrest him, arrest him!" they shouted from the Right. Robespierre
dropped exhausted on a bench, then they seized him, and his brother, and
Couthon, and Saint-Just, and ordered that the police should take them to
prison.
But it was one thing for the Convention to seize Robespierre singly, and
within its own hall; it was quite another for it to hold him and send
him to the guillotine. The whole physical force of Paris was nominally
with Robespierre. The Mayor, Fleuriot, closed the barriers, sounded the
tocsin, and forbade any jailer to receive the prisoners; while Henriot,
who had already been drinking, mounted a horse and galloped forth to
rouse the city. Fleuriot caused Robespierre, Couthon, and Le Bas to be
brought to the City Hall. A provisional government was completed. It
only remained to disperse the Assembly. Henriot undertook a duty which
looked easy. He seems to have collected about twenty guns, which he
brought to the Tuileries and trained on the hall of the Convention. The
deputies thought all was over. Collot-d'Herbois took the chair, which
was directly in range, put on his hat, and calmly said, as Henriot gave
the order to fire, "We can at least die at our post." No volley
came--the men had mutinied. Then the Convention declared Henriot beyond
the protection of the law, and Henriot fled to the City Hall. The
Convention chose Barras to command their armed force, but save a few
police they had no force. The night was wearing away and Fleuriot had
not been able to persuade Robespierre to take any decisive step.
Robespierre was, indeed, only a pettifogging attorney. At length he
consented to sign an appeal to arms. He had written two letters of his
name--"Ro"--when a section of police under Barras reached the City Hall.
They were but a handful, but the door was unguarded. They mounted the
stairs and as Robespierre finished the "o", one of these men, named
Merda, fired on him, breaking his jaw. The stain of blood is still on
the paper where Robespierre's head fell. They shot Couthon in the leg,
they threw Henriot out of the window into a cesspool below where he
wallowed all night, while Le Bas blew out his brains. The next day they
brought Robespierre to the Convention, but the Convention refused to
receive him. They threw him on a table, where he lay, horrible to be
seen, his coat torn down the back, his stockings falling over his heels,
his shirt open and soaking with blood, speechless, for his mouth was
filled with splinters of his broken jaw. Such was the man who the
morning before had been Dictator, and master of all the armies of
France. Couthon was in little better plight. Twenty-one in all were
condemned on the 10 Thermidor and taken in carts to the guillotine. An
awful spectacle. There was Robespierre with his disfigured face, half
dead, and Fleuriot, and Saint-Just, and Henriot next to Robespierre, his
forehead gashed, his right eye hanging down his cheek, dripping with
blood, and drenched with the filth of the sewer in which he had passed
the night. Under their feet lay the cripple Couthon, who had been thrown
in like a sack. Couthon was paralyzed, and he howled in agony as they
wrenched him straight to fasten him to the guillotine. It took a quarter
of an hour to finish with him, while the crowd exulted. A hundred
thousand people saw the procession and not a voice or a hand was raised
in protest. The whole world agreed that the Terror should end. But the
oldest of those who suffered on the 10 Thermidor was Couthon, who was
thirty-eight, Robespierre was thirty-five, and Saint-Just but
twenty-seven.
So closed the Terror with the strain which produced it. It will remain a
by-word for all time, and yet, appalling as it may have been, it was the
legitimate and the logical result of the opposition made by caste to the
advent of equality before the law. Also, the political courts served
their purpose. They killed out the archaic mind in France, a mind too
rigid to adapt itself to a changing environment. Thereafter no organized
opposition could ever be maintained against the new social equilibrium.
Modern France went on steadily to a readjustment, on the basis of
unification, simplification of administration, and equality before the
law, first under the Directory, then under the Consulate, and finally
under the Empire. With the Empire the Civil Code was completed, which I
take to be the greatest effort at codification of modern times.
Certainly it has endured until now. Governments have changed. The Empire
has yielded to the Monarchy, the Monarchy to the Republic, the Republic
to the Empire again, and that once more to the Republic, but the Code
which embodies the principle of equality before the law has remained.
Fundamentally the social equilibrium has been stable. And a chief reason
of this stability has been the organization of the courts upon rational
and conservative principles. During the Terror France had her fill of
political tribunals. Since the Terror French judges, under every
government, have shunned politics and have devoted themselves to
construing impartially the Code. Therefore all parties, and all ranks,
and all conditions of men have sustained the courts. In France, as in
England, there is no class jealousy touching the control of the
judiciary.
FOOTNOTES:
[40] _Histoire du Tribunal Revolutionaire de Paris_, H. Wallon, I, 57.
[41] "C'est demain qu'on me tue; n'êtes-vous donc qu'un lache?"