for some hours, people came and stared at him. Surgeons attended to
his wound, and he bore his sufferings with tranquillity. From the
moment when the shot was fired he never spoke; but at the Conciergerie
he asked, by signs, for writing materials. They were denied him, and
he went to death taking his secret with him out of the world. For
there has always been a mysterious suspicion that the tale has been
but half told, and that there is something deeper than the base and
hollow criminal on the surface. Napoleon liked him, and believed that
he meant well. Cambaceres, the archchancellor of the Empire, who
governed France when the Emperor took the field, said to him one day,
"It is a cause that was decided but was never argued."
Some of those who felled the tyrant, such as Cambon and Barere, long
after repented of their part in his fall. In the north of Europe,
especially in Denmark, he had warm admirers. European society believed
that he had affinity with it. It took him to be a man of authority,
integrity, and order, an enemy of corruption and of war, who fell
because he attempted to bar the progress of unbelief, which was the
strongest current of the age. His private life was inoffensive and
decent. He had been the equal of emperors and kings; an army of
700,000 men obeyed his word; he controlled millions of secret service
money, and could have obtained what he liked for pardons, and he lived
on a deputy's allowance of eighteen francs a day, leaving a fortune of
less than twenty guineas in depreciated assignats. Admiring enemies
assert that by legal confiscation, the division of properties, and the
progressive taxation of wealth, he would have raised the revenue to
twenty-two millions sterling, none of which would have been taken from
the great body of small cultivators who would thus have been for ever
bound to the Revolution. There is no doubt that he held fast to the
doctrine of equality, which means government by the poor and payment
by the rich. Also, he desired power, if it was only for
self-preservation; and he held it by bloodshed, as Lewis XIV. had
done, and Peter the Great, and Frederic. Indifference to the
destruction of human life, even the delight at the sight of blood, was
common all round him, and had appeared before the Revolution began.
The transformation of society as he imagined, if it cost a few
thousand heads in a twelvemonth, was less deadly than a single day of
Napoleon fighting for no worthier motive than ambition. His private
note-book has been printed, but it does not show what he thought of
the future. That is the problem which the guillotine left unsolved on
the evening of June 28, 1794. Only this is certain, that he remains
the most hateful character in the forefront of history since
Machiavelli reduced to a code the wickedness of public men.
XX
LA VENDEE
The remorseless tyranny which came to an end in Thermidor was not the
product of home causes. It was prepared by the defeat and defection of
Dumouriez; it was developed by the loss of the frontier fortresses in
the following July; and it fell when the tide of battle rolled away
after the victory of Fleurus. We have, therefore, to consider the
series of warlike transactions that reacted so terribly on the
government of France. At first, and especially in the summer of 1793,
the real danger was not foreign, but civil war. During four years the
Revolution always had force on its side. The only active opposition
had come from emigrant nobles who were a minority, acting for a class.
Not a battalion had joined Brunswick when he occupied a French
province; and the mass of the country people had been raised, under
the new order, to a better condition than they had ever known. For the
hard kernel of the revolutionary scheme, taken from agrarian Rome, was
that those who till the land shall own the land; that they should
enjoy the certainty of gathering the fruits of their toil for
themselves; that every family should possess as much as it could
cultivate. But the shock which now made the Republic tremble was an
insurrection of peasants, men of the favoured class; and the democracy
which was strong enough to meet the monarchies of Europe, saw its
armies put to flight by a rabble of field labourers and woodmen, led
by obscure commanders, of whom many had never served in war.
One of Washington's officers was a Frenchman who came out before
Lafayette, and was known as Colonel Armand. His real name was the
Marquis de La Rouerie. His stormy life had been rich in adventure and
tribulation. He had appeared on the boards of the opera; he had gone
about in company with a monkey; he had fought a duel, and believing
that he had killed his man had swallowed poison; he had been an inmate
of the monastery of La Trappe, after a temporary disappointment in
love; and he had been sent to the Bastille with other discontented
Bretons. On his voyage out his ship blew up in sight of land, and he
swam ashore. But this man who came out of the sea was found to be full
of audacity and resource. He rose to be a brigadier in the Continental
army; and when he came home, he became the organiser of the royalist
insurrection in the west. Authorised by the Princes, whom he visited
at Coblenz, he prepared a secret association in Brittany, which was to
co-operate with others in the central provinces.
While La Rouerie was adjusting his instruments and bringing the
complicated agency to perfection, the invaders came and went, and the
signal for action, when they were masters of Chalons, was never given.
When volunteers were called out to resist them, men with black
cockades went about interrupting the enrolment, and declaring that no
man should take arms, except to deliver the king. Their mysterious
leader, Cottereau, the first to bear the historic name of Jean Chouan,
was La Rouerie's right hand. When the prospect of combination with the
Powers was dissolved by Dumouriez, the character of the conspiracy
changed, and men began to think that they could fight the Convention
single-handed, while its armies were busy on the Rhine and Meuse.
Brittany had 200 miles of coast, and as the Channel Islands were in
sight, aid could come from British cruisers.
La Rouerie, who was a prodigy of inventiveness, and drew his lines
with so firm a hand that the Chouannerie, which broke out after his
death, lasted ten years and only went to pieces against Napoleon,
organised a rising, almost from Seine to Loire, for the spring of
1793. Indeed it is not enough to say that they went down before the
genius of Napoleon. The "Petite Chouannerie," as the rising of 1815
was called, contributed heavily to his downfall; for he was compelled
to send 20,000 men against it, whose presence might have turned the
fortune of the day at Waterloo.
But in January 1793 La Rouerie fell ill, the news of the king's death
made him delirious, and on the 30th he died. That the explosion might
yet take place at the appointed hour, they concealed his death, and
buried him in a wood, at midnight, filling the grave with quicklime.
The secret was betrayed, the remains were discovered, the accomplices
fled, and those who were taken died faithful to their trust.
The Breton rising had failed for the time, and royalists north of the
Loire had not recovered from the blow when La Vendee rose. The corpse
in the thicket was found February 26; the papers were seized March 3;
and it was March 12, at the moment when Brittany was paralysed, that
the conscription gave the signal of civil war. The two things are
quite separate. In one place there was a plot which came to nothing at
the time; in the other, there was an outbreak which had not been
prepared. La Vendee was not set in motion by the wires laid north of
the Loire. It broke out spontaneously, under sudden provocation. But
the Breton plot had ramified in that direction also, and there was
much expectant watching for the hour of combined action. Smugglers,
and poachers, and beggar men had carried the whispered parole, armed
with a passport in these terms: "Trust the bearer, and give him aid,
for the sake of Armand"; and certain remote and unknown country
gentlemen were affiliated, whose names soon after filled the world
with their renown. D'Elbee, the future commander-in-chief, was one of
them; and he always regarded the tumultuous outbreak of March, the
result of no ripened design, as a fatal error. That is the reason why
the gentry hung back at first, and were driven forward by the
peasants. It seemed madness to fight the Convention without previous
organisation for purposes of war, and without the support of the far
larger population of Brittany, which had the command of the coast,
and was in touch with the great maritime Power. Politics and religion
had roused much discontent; but the first real act of rebellion was
prompted by the new principle of compulsory service, proclaimed on
February 23.
The region which was to be the scene of so much glory and so much
sorrow lies chiefly between the left bank of the Loire and the sea,
about 100 miles across, from Saumur to the Atlantic, and 50 or 60 from
Nantes towards Poitiers. Into the country farther south, the Vendeans,
who were weak in cavalry and had no trained gunners, never penetrated.
The main struggle raged in a broken, wooded, and almost inaccessible
district called the Bocage, where there were few towns and no good
roads. That was the stronghold of the grand army, which included all
that was best in Vendean virtue. Along the coast there was a region of
fens, peopled by a coarser class of men, who had little intercourse
with their inland comrades, and seldom acted with them. Their leader,
Charette, the most active and daring of partisans, fought more for the
rapture of fighting than for the sake of a cause. He kept open
communication by sea, negotiated with England, and assured the
Bourbons that, if one of them appeared, he would place him at the head
of 200,000 men. He regarded the other commanders as subservient to the
clergy, and saw as little of them as he could.
The inhabitants of La Vendee, about 800,000, were well-to-do, and had
suffered less from degenerate feudalism than the east of France. They
lived on better terms with the landlords, and had less cause to
welcome the Revolution. Therefore, too, they clung to the nonjuring
clergy. At heart, they were royalist, aristocratic and clerical,
uniting anti-revolutionary motives that acted separately elsewhere.
That is the cause of their rising; but the secret of their power is in
the military talent, a thing more rare than courage, that was found
among them. The disturbances that broke out in several places on the
day of enrolment, were conducted by men of the people. Cathelineau,
one of the earliest, was a carrier, sacristan in his village, who had
never seen a shot fired when he went out with a few hundred neighbours
and took Cholet. By his side there was a gamekeeper, who had been a
soldier, and came from the eastern frontier. As his name was
Christopher, the Germans corrupted it into Stoffel, and he made it
famous in the form of Stofflet. While the conflict was carried on by
small bands there was no better man to lead them. He and Charette held
out longest, and had not been conquered when the clergy, for whom they
fought, betrayed them.
The popular and democratic interval was short. After the first few
days the nobles were at the head of affairs. They deemed the cause
desperate, that one of them had promoted the rising, scarcely one
refused to join in it. The one we know best is Lescure, because his
wife's memoirs have been universally read. Lescure formed the bond
between gentry and clergy, for the cause was religious as much as
political. He would have been the third generalissimo, but he was
disabled by a wound, and put forward his cousin, Henri de la
Rochejaquelein, in preference to Stofflet. We shall presently see that
a grave suspicion darkens his fame. Like Lescure, d'Elbee was a man of
policy and management; but he was no enthusiast. He desired a
reasonable restoration, not a reaction; and he said just before his
death that when the pacification came it would be well to keep
fanatics in order.
Far above all these men in capacity for war, and on a level with the
best in character, was the Marquis de Bonchamps. He understood the art
of manoeuvring large masses of men; and as his followers would have
to meet large masses, when the strife became deadly, he sought to
train them for it. He made them into that which they did not want to
be, and for which they were ill-fitted. It is due to his immediate
command that the war could be carried on upon a large scale; and that
men who had begun with a rush and a night attack, dispersing when the
foe stood his ground, afterwards defeated the veterans of the Rhine
under the best generals of republican France. Bonchamps always urged
the need of sending a force to rouse Brittany; but the day when the
army crossed the Loire was the day of his death.
La Vendee was far from the route of invading armies, and the district
threatened by the Germans. There were no fears for hearth and home, no
terrors in a European war for those who kept out of it. If they must
fight, they chose to fight in a cause which they loved. They hated the
Revolution, not enough to take arms against it, but enough to refuse
to defend it. They were compelled to choose. Either they must resist
oppression, or they must serve it, and must die for a Government which
was at war with their friends, with the European Conservatives, who
gave aid to the fugitive nobles, and protection to the persecuted
priests. Their resistance was not a matter of policy. There was no
principle in it that could be long maintained. The conscription only
forced a decision. There were underlying causes for aversion and
vengeance, although the actual outbreak was unpremeditated. The angry
peasants stood alone for a moment; then was seen the stronger
argument, the greater force behind. Clergy and gentry put forward the
claim of conscience, and then the men who had been in the royalist
plot with La Rouerie, began to weave a new web. That plot had been
authorised by the princes, on the _emigre_ lines, and aimed at the
restoration of the old order. That was not, originally, the spirit of
La Vendee. It was never identified with absolute monarchy. At first,
the army was known as the Christian army. Then, it became the Catholic
and royal army. The altar was nearer to their hearts than the throne.
As a sign of it, the clergy occupied the higher place in the councils.
Some of the leaders had been Liberals of '89. Others surrendered
royalism and accepted the Republic as soon as religious liberty was
assured. Therefore, throughout the conflict, and in spite of some
intolerant elements, and of some outbursts of reckless fury, La Vendee
had the better cause. One Vendean, surrounded and summoned to give up
his arms, cried: "First give me back my God."
Bernier, the most conspicuous of the ecclesiastical leaders, was an
intriguer; but he was no fanatical adherent of obsolete institutions.
The restoration of religion was, to him, the just and sufficient
object of the insurrection. A time came when he was very careful to
dissociate La Vendee from Brittany, as the champions, respectively, of
a religious and a dynastic cause. He saw his opportunity under the
Consulate, came out of his hiding-place, and promoted a settlement. He
became the agent and auxiliary of Bonaparte, in establishing the
Concordat, which is as far removed from intolerance as from
legitimacy. As bishop of Orleans he again appeared in the Loire
country, not far from the scene of his exploits; but he was odious to
many of the old associates, who felt that he had employed their
royalism for other ends, without being a royalist.
The country gentlemen of La Vendee had either not emigrated, or had
returned to their homes, after seeing what the emigration came to. As
far as their own interests were concerned, they accepted the
situation. With all the combative spirit which made their brief career
so brilliant, few of them displayed violent or extreme opinions. La
Vendee was made illustrious mainly by men who dreaded neither the
essentials of the Revolution nor its abiding consequences, but who
strove to rescue their country from the hands of persecutors and
assassins. The rank and file were neither so far-sighted nor so
moderate. At times they exhibited much the same ferocity as the
fighting men of Paris, and in spite of their devotion, they had the
cruel and vindictive disposition which in France has been often
associated with religion. It was seen from the outset among the wild
followers of Charette; and even the enthusiasts of Anjou and of Upper
Poitou degenerated and became bloodthirsty. They all hated the towns,
where there were municipal authorities who arrested priests, and
levied requisitions and men.
The insurrection began by a series of isolated attacks on all the
small towns, which were seats of government; and in two months of the
spring of 1793 the republicans had been swept away, and the whole
country of La Vendee belonged to the Vendeans. They were without
order or discipline or training of any sort, and were averse to the
sight of officers overtopping them on horseback. Without artillery of
their own, they captured 500 cannon. By the end of April they were
estimated at near 100,000, a proportion of fighting men to population
that has only been equalled in the War of Secession. When the signal
was given, the tocsin rang in 600 parishes. In spite of momentary
reverses, they carried everything before them, until, on the 9th of
June, they took Saumur, a fortress which gave them the command of the
Loire. There they stood on the farthest limit of their native
province, with 40,000 soldiers, and a large park of artillery. To
advance beyond that point, they would require an organisation stronger
than the bonds of neighbourhood and the accidental influence of local
men. They established a governing body, largely composed of clergy;
and they elected a commander-in-chief. The choice fell on Cathelineau,
because he was a simple peasant, and was trusted by the priests who
were still dominant. As they were all equal there arose a demand for a
bishop who should hold sway over them. Nonjuring bishops were scarce
in France; but Lescure contrived to supply the need of the moment.
Here, in the midst of so much that was tragic, and of so much that was
of good report, we come to the bewildering and grotesque adventure of
the bishop of Agra.
At Dol, near St. Malo, there was a young priest who took the oath to
the Constitution, but afterwards dropped the cassock, appeared at
Poitiers as a man of pleasure, and was engaged to be married. He
volunteered in the republican cavalry, and took the field against the
royalists, mounted and equipped by admiring friends. On May 5, he was
taken prisoner, and as his card of admission to the Jacobins was found
upon him, he thought himself in danger. He informed his captors that
he was on their side; that he was a priest in orders, whom it would be
sacrilege to injure; at last, that he was not only a priest, but a
bishop, whom, in the general dispersion, the Pope had chosen as his
vicar apostolic to the suffering Church of France. His name was
Guyot, and he called himself Folleville. Such a captive was worth more
than a regiment of horse. Lescure carried the republican trooper to
his country house for a few days; and on May 16 Guyot reappeared in
the robes proper to a bishop, with the mitre, ring, and crozier that
belonged to his exalted dignity.
It was a great day in camp under the white flag; and the enemy,
watching through his telescope, beheld with amazement the kneeling
ranks of Vendean infantry, and a gigantic prelate who strode through
them and distributed blessings. He addressed them when they went into
action, promising victory to those who fought, and heaven to those who
fell, in so good a cause; and he went under fire with a crucifix in
his hand, and ministered to the wounded. They put him at the head of
the council, and required every priest to obey him, under pain of
arrest. Bernier, who had been at school with Guyot, was not deceived.
He denounced him at Rome, through Maury, who was living there in the
enjoyment of well-earned honours. The fraud was at once exposed. Pius
VI. declared that the bishop of Agra did not exist; and that he knew
nothing of the man so called, except that he was an impostor and a
rogue.
From the moment when Bernier wrote, Guyot was in his power; but it was
October before he translated the papal Latin to the generals. They
resolved to take no notice, but the detected pretender ceased to say
Mass. La Rochejaquelein intended to put him on board ship and get rid
of him at the first seaport. They never reached the sea. To the last,
at Granville, Guyot was seen in the midst of danger, and his girdle
was among the spoils of the field. Though the officers watched him,
the men never found him out. He served them faithfully during his six
months of precarious importance, and he perished with them. He might
have obtained hope of life by betraying the mendacity of his
accomplices, and the imbecility of his dupes. He preferred to die
without exposing them.
In June, when the victorious Vendeans occupied Saumur, it was time
that they should have a policy and a plan. They had four alternatives.
They might besiege Nantes and open communications with English
cruisers. They might join with the royalists of the centre. They might
raise an insurrection in Brittany, or they might strike for Paris. The
great road to the capital opened before them; there were the prisoners
in the Temple to rescue, and the monarch to restore. Dim reports of
their exploits reached the queen, and roused hopes of deliverance. In
a smuggled note, the Princess Elizabeth inquired whether the men of
the west had reached Orleans; in another, she asked, not unreasonably,
what had become of the British fleet. It is said that Stofflet gave
that heroic counsel. Napoleon believed that if they had followed it,
nothing could have prevented the white flag from waving on the towers
of Notre Dame. But there was no military organisation; the troops
received no pay, and went home when they pleased. The generals were
hopelessly divided, and Charette would not leave his own territory.
Bonchamps, who always led his men, and was hit in every action, was
away, disabled by a wound. His advice was known. He thought that their
only hope was to send a small corps to rouse the Bretons. With the
united forces of Brittany and Vendee they would then march for Paris.
They adopted a compromise, and decided to besiege Nantes, an open
town, the headquarters of commerce with the West Indies, and of the
African slave trade. If Nantes fell it would be likely to rouse
Brittany; and it was an expedition in which Charette would take a
part. This was the disastrous advice of Cathelineau. They went down
from Saumur to Nantes, by the right bank of the Loire, and on the
night of June 28, their fire-signals summoned Charette for the morrow.
Charette did not fail. But he was beyond the river, unable to make his
way across, and he resented the arrangement which was to give the
pillage of the wealthy city to the pious soldiers of Anjou and Poitou,
whilst he looked on from a distance.