regarded as hostages, the Girondins, for the rising in the south, the
queen for the rising in the west. An attempt to save the life of Marie
Antoinette had been made by the government, with the sanction of
Danton. Maret was sent to negotiate the neutrality of minor Italian
States by offering to release her. Austria, not wishing the Italians
to be neutral, seized Maret and his companion Semonville, in the
passes of the Grisons, and sent them to a dungeon at Mantua. The queen
was sent to the Conciergerie, which was the last stage before the
Tribunal; and as her nephew, the emperor, did not relent, in October
she was put on her trial, and executed. The death of the queen is
revolting, because it was a move in a game, a concession by which
Robespierre paid his debts to men at that time more violent than
himself, and averted their attack. We have already seen that the
advice she gave in decisive moments was disastrous, that she had no
belief in the rights of nations, that she plotted war and destruction
against her own people. There was cause enough for hatred. But if we
ask ourselves who there is that comes forth unscathed from the trials
that befell kings and queens in those or even in other times, and
remember how often she pleaded and served the national cause against
royalist and _emigre_, even against the great Irishman[2] whose
portrait of her at Versailles, translated by Dutens, was shown to her
by the Duchess of Fitzjames, we must admit that she deserved a better
fate than most of those with whom we can compare her.
[2] Burke, _Reflections on the French Revolution_.
That month of October, 1793, with its new and unprecedented
development of butchery, was a season of triumph to the party of
Hebert. The policy of wholesale arrest, rapid judgment, and speedy
execution was avowedly theirs; and to them Robespierre seemed a
lethargic, undecided person who only moved under pressure. He was at
last moving as they wished; but the merit was theirs, and theirs the
reward. One of them, Vincent, was of so bloodthirsty a disposition
that he found comfort in gnawing the heart of a calf as if it was that
of a royalist. But the party was not made up of ferocious men only.
They had two enemies, the aristocrat and the priest; and they had two
passions, the abolition of an upper class and the abolition of
religion. Others had attacked the clergy, and others again had
attacked religion. The originality of these men is that they sought a
substitute for it, and wished to give men something to believe in that
was not God. They were more eager to impose the new belief than to
destroy the old. Indeed, they were persuaded that the old was hurrying
towards extinction, and was inwardly rejected by those who professed
it. While Hebert was an anarchist, Chaumette was the glowing patriarch
of irreligious belief. He regarded the Revolution as essentially
hostile to Christian faith, and conceived that its inmost principle
was that which he now propounded. The clergy had been popular, for a
day, in 1789; but the National Assembly refused to declare that the
country was Catholic. In June 1792 the Jacobin Club rejected a
proposal to abolish the State-Church, and to erect Franklin and
Rousseau in the niches occupied by Saints, and in December a member
speaking against divine worship met with no support. On May 30, 1793,
during the crisis of the Gironde, the procession of Corpus Christi
moved unmolested through the streets of Paris; and on August 25,
Robespierre presiding, the Convention expressly repudiated a petition
to suppress preaching in the name of Almighty God.
On September 20, Romme brought the new calendar before the Assembly,
at a moment when, he said, equality reigned in heaven as well as on
earth. It was adopted on November 24, with the sonorous nomenclature
devised by Fabre d'Eglantine. It signified the substitution of Science
for Christianity. Winemonth and fruitmonth were not more unchristian
than Julius and Augustus, or than Venus and Saturn; but the practical
result was the abolition of Sundays and festivals, and the supremacy
of reason over history, of the astronomer over the priest. The
calendar was so completely a weapon of offence, that nobody cared
about the absurdity of names which were inapplicable to other
latitudes, and unintelligible at Isle de France or Pondicherry. While
the Convention wavered, moving sometimes in one direction and then
retracing its steps, the Commune advanced resolutely, for Chaumette
was encouraged by the advantage acquired by his friends in September
and October. He thought the time now come to close the churches, and
to institute new forms of secularised worship. Supported by a German
more enthusiastic than himself, Anacharsis Cloots, he persuaded the
bishop of Paris that his Church was doomed like that of the Nonjurors,
that the faithful had no faith in it, that the country had given it
up. Chaumette was able to add that the Commune wanted to get rid of
him. Gobel yielded. On November 7, he appeared, with some of his
clergy, at the bar of the Convention, and resigned to the people what
he had received from the people. Other priests and bishops followed,
and it appeared that some were men who had gone about with masks on
their faces, and were glad to renounce beliefs which they did not
share. Sieyes declared what everybody knew, that he neither believed
the doctrines nor practised the rites of his Church; and he
surrendered a considerable income. Some have doubted whether Gobel was
equally disinterested. They say that he offered his submission to the
Pope in return for a modest sum, and it is affirmed that he received
compensation through Cloots and Chaumette, to whom his solemn
surrender was worth a good deal. The force of his example lost
somewhat, when the bishop of Blois, Gregoire, as violent an enemy of
kings as could be found anywhere, stood in the tribune, and refused to
abandon his ecclesiastical post. He remained in the Convention to the
end, clad in the coloured robes of a French prelate.
Three days after the ceremony of renunciation, Chaumette opened the
Cathedral of Notre Dame to the religion of Reason. The Convention
stood aloof, in cold disdain. But an actress, who played the leading
part, and was variously described as the Goddess of Reason or the
Goddess of Liberty, and who possibly did not know herself which she
was, came down from her throne in the church, proceeded to the
Assembly, and was admitted to a seat beside the President, who gave
her what was known as a friendly accolade amid loud applause. After
that invasion, the hesitating deputies yielded, and about half of them
attended the goddess back to her place under the Gothic towers.
Chaumette decidedly triumphed. He had already forbidden religious
service outside the buildings. He had now turned out the clergy whom
the State had appointed, and had filled their place with a Parisian
actress. He had overcome the evident reluctance of the Assembly, and
made the deputies partake in his ceremonial. He proceeded, November
23, to close the churches, and the Commune resolved that whoever
opened a church should incur the penalties of a suspect. It was the
zenith of Hebertism.
Two men unexpectedly united against Chaumette and appeared as
champions of Christendom. They were Danton and Robespierre.
Robespierre had been quite willing that there should be men more
extreme than he, whose aid he could cheaply purchase with a few
cartloads of victims. But he did not intend to suppress religion in
favour of a worship in which there was no God. It was opposed to his
policy, and it was against his conviction; for, like his master,
Rousseau, he was a theistic believer, and even intolerant in his
belief. This was not a link between him and Danton who had no such
spiritualist convictions, and who, so far as he was a man of theory,
belonged to a different school of eighteenth-century thought. But
Danton had been throughout assailed by the Hebertist party, and was
disgusted with their violence. The death of the Girondins appalled
him, for he could see no good reason which would exempt him from their
rate. He had no hope for the future of the Republic, no enthusiasm,
and no belief. From that time in October, his thoughts were turned
towards moderation. He identified Hebert, not Robespierre, with the
unceasing bloodshed, and he was willing to act with the latter, his
real rival, against the raging exterminators. From the end of
September he was absent in his own house at Arcis. At his return he
and Robespierre denounced the irreligious masquerades, and spoke for
the clergy, who had as good a right to toleration as their opponents.
When Robespierre declared that the Convention never intended to
proscribe the Catholic worship, he was sincere, and was taking the
first step that led to the feast of the Supreme Being. Danton acted
from policy only, in opposition to men who were his own enemies.
Chaumette and Hebert succumbed. The Commune proclaimed that the
churches were not to be closed; and early in December the worship of
Reason, having lasted twenty-six days, came to an end. The wound was
keenly felt. Fire and poison, said Chaumette, were the weapons with
which the priests attack the nation. For such traitors, there must be
no mercy. It is a question of life and death. Let us throw up between
us the barrier of eternity. The Mass was no longer said in public. It
continued in private chapels throughout the winter until the end of
February. In April, one head of accusation against Chaumette was his
interference with midnight service at Christmas.
Robespierre had repressed Hebertism with the aid of Danton. The
visible sign of their understanding was the appearance in December of
the _Vieux Cordelier_. In this famous journal Camille Desmoulins
pleaded the cause of mercy with a fervour which, at first, resembled
sincerity, and pilloried Hebert as a creature that got drunk on the
drippings of the guillotine, Robespierre saw the earlier numbers in
proof; but by Christmas he had enough of the bargain. The Convention,
having shown some inclination towards clemency on December 20,
withdrew from it on the 26th, and Desmoulins, in the last of his six
numbers, loudly retracted his former argument. The alliance was
dissolved. It had served the purpose of Robespierre, by defeating
Hebert, and discrediting Danton. In January, the _Vieux Cordelier_
ceased to appear.
Robespierre now stood between the two hostile parties--Danton,
Desmoulins, and their friends, on the side of a regular government;
Hebert, Chaumette, and Collot, returned from a terrible proconsulate,
wishing to govern by severities. The energy of Collot gave new life to
his party, whilst Danton displayed no resource. Just then, Robespierre
was taken ill, and from February 19 to March 13 he was confined to his
room. Robespierre was a calculator and a tactician, methodical in his
ways, definite and measured in his ends. He was less remarkable for
determination and courage; and thus two men of uncommon energy now
took the lead. They were Billaud-Varennes and St. Just. When St. Just
was with the army, his companion Baudot relates that they astonished
the soldiers by their intrepidity under fire. He adds that they had no
merit, for they knew that they bore charmed lives, and that cannon
balls could not touch them. That was the ardent and fanatical spirit
that St. Just brought back with him. During his leader's illness he
acquired the initiative, and proclaimed the doctrine that all factions
constitute a division of power, that they weaken the state, and are
therefore treasonable combinations.
On March 4, Hebert called the people to arms against the government
of Moderates. The attempt failed, and Robespierre, by a large
expenditure of money, had Paris on his side. At one moment he even
thought of making terms with this dangerous rival; and there is a
story that he lost heart, and meditated flight to America. In this
particular crisis money played a part, and Hebert was financed by
foreign bankers, to finish the tyranny of Robespierre. On March 13 he
was arrested, Chaumette on the 18th; and on the 17th, Herault de
Sechelles, Danton's friend, on coming to the Committee of Public
Safety, was told by Robespierre to retire, as they were deliberating
on his arrest. On the 19th the Dantonists caused the arrest of Heron,
the police agent of Robespierre, who instantly had him released. March
24, Hebert was sent to the scaffold. On the way he lamented to Ronsin
that the Republic was about to perish. "The Republic," said the other,
"is immortal." Hitherto the guillotine had been used to destroy the
vanquished parties, and persons notoriously hostile. It was an easy
inference, that it might serve against personal rivals, who were the
best of Republicans and Jacobins. The victims in the month of March
were 127.
Danton did nothing to arrest the slaughter. His inaction ruined him,
and deprived him of that portion of sympathy which is due to a man who
suffers for his good intentions. Billaud and St. Just demanded that he
should be arrested, and carried it, at a night sitting of the
Committee. Only one refused to sign. Danton had been repeatedly and
amply warned. Thibaudeau, Rousselin, had told him what was impending.
Panis, at the last moment, came to him at the opera, and offered him a
place of refuge. Westermann proposed to him to rouse the armed people.
Tallien entreated him to take measures of defence; and Tallien was
president of the Convention. A warning reached him from the very grave
of Marat. Albertine came to him and told him that her brother had
always spoken with scorn of Robespierre as a man of words. She
exclaimed, "Go to the tribune while Tallien presides, carry the
Assembly, and crush the Committees. There is no other road to safety
for a man like you!" "What?" he replied; "I am to kill Robespierre and
Billaud?" "If you do not, they will kill you." He said to one of his
advisers, "The tribunal would absolve me." To another, "Better to be
guillotined than to guillotine." And to a third, "They will never
dare!" In a last interview, Robespierre accused him of having
encouraged the opposition of Desmoulins, and of having regretted the
Girondins. "Yes," said Danton, "it is time to stop the shedding of
blood." "Then," returned the other, "you are a conspirator, and you
own it." Danton, knowing that he was lost, burst into tears. All
Europe would cast him out; and, as he had said, he was not a man who
could carry his country in the soles of his shoes. One formidable
imputation was to call him a bondsman of Mr. Pitt; for Pitt had said
that if there were negotiations, the best man to treat with would be
Danton. He was arrested, with Camille Desmoulins and other friends, on
the night of March 31. Legendre moved next day that he be heard before
the Convention, and if they had heard him, he would still have been
master there. Robespierre felt all the peril of the moment, and the
Right supported him in denying the privilege. Danton defended himself
with such force that the judges lost their heads, and the tones of the
remembered voice were heard outside, and agitated the crowd. The
Committee of Public Safety refused the witnesses called for the
defence, and cut short the proceedings. The law was broken that Danton
and his associates might be condemned.
There was not in France a more thorough patriot than Danton; and all
men could see that he had been put to death out of personal spite, and
jealousy, and fear. There was no way, thenceforth, for the victor to
maintain his power, but the quickening of the guillotine. Reserving
compassion for less ignoble culprits, we must acknowledge that the
defence of Danton is in the four months of increasing terror that
succeeded the 5th of April 1794, when Robespierre took his stand at
the corner of the Tuileries to watch the last moments of his partner
in crime.
The sudden decline of Danton, and his ruin by the hands of men
evidently inferior to him in capacity and vigour, is so strange an
event that it has been explained by a story which is worth telling,
though it is not authenticated enough to influence the narrative. In
June 1793, just after the fall of the Girondins, Danton was married.
His bride insisted that their union should be blessed by a priest who
had not taken the oaths. Danton agreed, found the priest, and went to
confession. He became unfitted for his part in the Revolution, dropped
out of the Committees, and retired, discouraged and disgusted, into
the country. When he came back, after the execution of the queen, of
Madame Roland, and the Girondins, he took the side of the proscribed
clergy, and encouraged the movement in favour of clemency. In this way
he lost his popularity and influence, and refused to adopt the means
of recovering power. He neglected even to take measures for his
personal safety, like a man who was sick of his life. At that time,
seven of the priests of Paris, whose names are given, took it by turns
to follow the carts from the prison to the guillotine, disguised as
one of the howling mob, for the comfort and consolation of the dying.
And the abbe de Keravenant, who had married Danton, thus followed him
to the scaffold, was recognised by him, and absolved him at the last
moment.
XIX
ROBESPIERRE
We reach the end of the Reign of Terror, on the 9th of Thermidor, the
most auspicious date in modern history. In April Robespierre was
absolute. He had sent Hebert to death because he promoted disorder,
Chaumette because he suppressed religion, Danton because he had sought
to restrain bloodshed. His policy was to keep order and authority by
regulated terror, and to relax persecution. The governing power was
concentrated in the Committee of Public Safety by abolishing the
office of minister, instead of which there were twelve Boards of
Administration reporting to the Committee. That there might be no
rival power, the municipality was remodelled and placed in the hands
of men attached to Robespierre. The dualism remained between
representation in the Assembly and the more direct action of the
sovereign people in the Town Hall. When the tocsin rings, said a
member of the Commune, the Convention ceases to exist. In other words,
when the principal chooses to interfere, he supersedes his agent. The
two notions of government are contradictory, and the bodies that
incorporated them were naturally hostile. But their antagonism was
suspended while Robespierre stood between.
The reformed Commune at once closed all clubs that were not Jacobin.
All parties had been crushed: Royalists, Feuillants, Girondins,
Cordeliers. What remained of them in the scattered prisons of France
was now to be forwarded to Paris, and there gradually disposed of. But
though there no longer existed an opposing party, there was still a
class of men that had not been reduced or reconciled. This consisted
chiefly of deputies who had been sent out to suppress the rising of
the provinces in 1793. These Commissaries of the Convention had
enjoyed the exercise of enormous authority; they had the uncontrolled
power of life and death, and they had gathered spoil without scruple,
from the living and the dead. On that account they were objects of
suspicion to the austere personage at the head of the State; and they
were known to be the most unscrupulous and the most determined of men.
Robespierre, who was nervously apprehensive, saw very early where the
danger lay, and he knew which of these enemies there was most cause to
dread. He never made up his mind how to meet the peril; he threatened
before he struck; and the others combined and overthrew him. He had
helped to unite them by introducing a conflict of ideas at a time
when, apparently, and on the surface, there was none. Everybody was a
Republican and a Jacobin, but Robespierre now insisted on the belief
in God. He perished by the monstrous imposture of associating divine
sanction with the crimes of his sanguinary reign. The scheme was not
suggested by expediency, for he had been always true to the idea. In
early life he had met Rousseau at Ermenonville, and he had adopted the
indeterminate religion of the "vicaire Savoyard." In March 1792 he
proposed a resolution, that the belief in Providence and a future life
is a necessary condition of Jacobinism. In November, he argued that
the decline of religious conviction left only a residue of ideas
favourable to liberty and public virtue, and that the essential
principles of politics might be found in the sublime teaching of
Christ. He objected to disendowment, because it is necessary to keep
up reverence for an authority superior to man. Therefore, on December
5, he induced the Club to break in pieces the bust of Helvetius.
Although Rousseau, the great master, had been a Genevese Calvinist,
nobody thought of preserving Christianity in a Protestant form. The
Huguenot ministers themselves did nothing for it, and Robespierre had
a peculiar dislike of them. Immediately after the execution of Danton
and before the trial of Chaumette, the restoration of religion was
foreshadowed by Couthon. A week later it was resolved that the remains
of Rousseau, the father of the new church, should be transferred to
the Pantheon.
On May 7, Robespierre brought forward his famous motion that the
Convention acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being. His argument,
stripped of parliamentary trappings, was this. The secret of the life
of a Republic is public and private virtue, that is, integrity, the
consciousness of duty, the spirit of self-sacrifice, submission to the
discipline of authority. These are the natural conditions of pure
democracy; but in an advanced stage of civilisation they are difficult
to maintain without the restraint of belief in God, in eternal life,
in government by Providence. Society will be divided by passion and
interest, unless it is reconciled and controlled by that which is the
universal foundation of religions. By this appeal to a higher power
Robespierre hoped to strengthen the State at home and abroad. In the
latter purpose he succeeded; and the solemn renunciation of atheism
impressed the world. It was very distinctly a step in the Conservative
direction, for it promised religious liberty. There was to be no
favour to churches, but also no persecution. Practically, the
advantage was for the Christian part of the population, and
irreligion, though not proscribed, was discouraged. The Revolution
appeared to be turning backwards, and to seek its friends among those
who had acquired their habits of life and thought under the fallen
order. The change was undoubted; and it was a change imposed by the
will of one man, unsupported by any current of opinion.
A month later, June 8, the Feast of the Supreme Being was held with
all the solemnity of which Paris was capable. Robespierre walked in
procession from the Tuileries to the Champ de Mars, at the head of the
Convention. As the others fell back, he marched alone with his hair
powdered, a large nosegay in his hands, wearing the sky-blue coat and
nankeens by which he is remembered, for they reappeared in the crisis
of Thermidor. He had attained the loftiest summit of prosperity and
greatness that was ever given to man. Not a monarch in Europe could
compare with him in power. All that had stood in his way during the
last five years had been swept to destruction; all that survived of
the Revolution followed obedient at his heels. At the last election of
a President in the Convention there had been 117 votes; but 485 had
voted for Robespierre, that he might parade at their head that day. It
was there, in that supreme and intoxicating moment, that a gulf opened
before him, and he became aware of the extremity of his peril. For he
could hear the hostile deputies in the front rank behind him,
muttering curses and sneering at the enthusiasm with which he was
received. Those fierce proconsuls who, at Lyons, Nevers, Nantes,
Toulon, had crushed all that they were now forced to venerate by their
master, vowed vengeance for their humiliation. They said that this was
to be a starting-point for divine right, and the excuse for a new
persecution. They felt that they were forging a weapon against
themselves, and committing an act of suicide. The decree of the month
before would have involved no such dire consequences; but the
elaborate and aggressive ceremonial was felt as a declaration of war.