The Antechamber to Success.
Punishment of the Terrorists -- Dangers of the Thermidorians
-- Successes of Republican Arms -- Some Republican Generals
-- Military Prodigies -- The Treaty of Basel -- Vendean
Disorders Repressed -- A "White Terror" -- Royalist Activity
-- Friction Under the New Constitution -- Arrival of
Buonaparte in Paris -- Paris Society -- Its Power -- The
People Angry -- Resurgence of Jacobinism -- Buonaparte's
Dejection -- His Relations with Mme. Permon -- His
Magnanimity.
[Sidenote: 1795.]
From time to time after the events of Thermidor the more active agents
of the Terror were sentenced to transportation, and the less guilty
were imprisoned. On May seventh, 1795, three days before Buonaparte's
arrival in Paris, Fouquier-Tinville, and fifteen other wretches who
had been but tools, the executioners of the revolutionary tribunal,
were put to death. The National Guard had been reorganized, and
Pichegru was recalled from the north to take command of the united
forces in Paris under a committee of the Convention with Barras at its
head.
This was intended to overawe those citizens of Paris who were hostile
to the Jacobins. They saw the trap set for them, and were angry.
During the years of internal disorder and foreign warfare just passed
the economic conditions of the land had grown worse and worse, until,
in the winter of 1794-95, the laboring classes of Paris were again on
the verge of starvation. As usual, they attributed their sufferings to
the government, and there were bread riots. Twice in the spring of
1795--on April first and May twentieth--the unemployed and hungry rose
to overthrow the Convention, but they were easily put down by the
soldiers on both occasions. The whole populace, as represented by the
sections or wards of Paris, resented this use of armed force, and grew
uneasy. The Thermidorians further angered it by introducing a new
metropolitan administration, which greatly diminished the powers and
influence of the sections, without, however, destroying their
organization. The people of the capital, therefore, were ready for
mischief. The storming of the Tuileries on August tenth, 1792, had
been the work of the Paris mob. Why could they not in turn, another
mob, reactionary and to a degree even royalist, overthrow the tyranny
of the Jacobins as they themselves had overthrown the double-faced
administration of the King?
A crisis might easily have been precipitated before Buonaparte's
arrival in Paris, but it was delayed by events outside the city. The
year 1794 had been a brilliant season for the republican arms and for
republican diplomacy. We have seen how the Piedmontese were forced
beyond the maritime Alps; the languid and worthless troops of Spain
were expelled from the Pyrenean strongholds and forced southward; in
some places, beyond the Ebro. Pichegru, with the Army of the North,
had driven the invaders from French soil and had conquered the
Austrian Netherlands. Jourdan, with the Army of the Sambre and Meuse,
had defeated the Austrians at Fleurus in a battle decided by the
bravery of Marceau, thus confirming the conquest. Other generals were
likewise rising to eminence. Hoche had in 1793 beaten the Austrians
under Wurmser at Weissenburg, and driven them from Alsace. He had now
further heightened his fame by his successes against the insurgents
of the west. Saint-Cyr, Bernadotte, and Kléber, with many others of
Buonaparte's contemporaries, had also risen to distinction in minor
engagements.
Of peasant birth, Pichegru was nevertheless appointed by
ecclesiastical influence as a scholar at Brienne. In the dearth of
generals he was selected for promotion by Saint-Just as was Hoche at
the time when Carnot discovered Jourdan. Having assisted Hoche in the
conquest of Alsace when a division general and only thirty-two years
old, he began the next year, in 1794, to deploy his extraordinary
powers, and with Moreau as second in command he swept the English and
Austrians out of the Netherlands. Both these generals were sensitive
and jealous men; after brilliant careers under the republic they
turned royalists and came to unhappy ends. Moreau was two years the
junior. He was the son of a Breton lawyer and rose to notice both as a
local politician, and as a volunteer captain in the Breton struggles
for independence with which he had no sympathy. As a great soldier he
ranks with Hoche after Napoleon in the revolutionary time. Hoche was
younger still, having been born in 1768. In 1784 he enlisted as a
common soldier and rose from the ranks by sheer ability. He died at
the age of thirty, but as a politician and strategist he was already
famous. Kléber was an Alsatian who had been educated in the military
school at Munich and was already forty-one years old. Having enlisted
under the Revolution as a volunteer, he so distinguished himself on
the Rhine that he was swiftly promoted; but, thwarted in his ambition
to have an independent command, he lost his ardor and did not again
distinguish himself until he secured service under Napoleon in Egypt.
There he exhibited such capacity that he was regarded as one of
Bonaparte's rivals. He was assassinated by an Oriental in Cairo.
Bernadotte was four years the senior of Bonaparte, the son of a lawyer
in Paris. He too enlisted in the ranks, as a royal marine, and rose by
his own merits. He was a rude radical whose military ability was
paralleled by his skill in diplomacy. His swift promotion was obtained
in the Rhenish campaigns. Gouvion Saint-Cyr was also born in 1764 at
Toul. He was a marquis but an ardent reformer, and a born soldier. He
began as a volunteer captain on the staff of Custine, and rising like
the others mentioned became an excellent general, though his chances
for distinction were few. Jourdan was likewise a nobleman, born at
Limoges to the rank of count in 1762. His long career was solid rather
than brilliant, though he gained great distinction in the northern
campaigns and ended as a marshal, the military adviser of Joseph
Bonaparte in Naples and Madrid.
The record of military energy put forth by the liberated nation under
Jacobin rule stands, as Fox declared in the House of Commons,
absolutely unique. Twenty-seven victories, eight in pitched battle;
one hundred and twenty fights; ninety thousand prisoners; one hundred
and sixteen towns and important places captured; two hundred and
thirty forts or redoubts taken; three thousand eight hundred pieces of
ordnance, seventy thousand muskets, one thousand tons of powder, and
ninety standards fallen into French hands--such is the incredible
tale. Moreover, the army had been purged with as little mercy as a
mercantile corporation shows to incompetent employees. It is often
claimed that the armies of republican France and of Napoleon were,
after all, the armies of the Bourbons. Not so. The conscription law,
though very imperfect in itself, was supplemented by the general
enthusiasm; a nation was now in the ranks instead of hirelings; the
reorganization had remodeled the whole structure, and between January
first, 1792, and January twentieth, 1795, one hundred and ten division
commanders, two hundred and sixty-three generals of brigade, and one
hundred and thirty-eight adjutant-generals either resigned, were
suspended from duty, or dismissed from the service. The republic had
new leaders and new men in its armies.
The nation had apparently determined that the natural boundary of
France and of its own revolutionary system was the Rhine. Nice and
Savoy would round out their territory to the south. This much the new
government, it was understood, would conquer, administer, and keep;
the Revolution in other lands, impelled but not guided by French
influence, must manage its own affairs. This was, of course, an
entirely new diplomatic situation. Under its pressure Holland, by the
aid of Pichegru's army, became the Batavian Republic, and ceded Dutch
Flanders to France; while Prussia abandoned the coalition, and in the
treaty of Basel, signed on April fifth, 1795, agreed to the neutrality
of all north Germany. In return for the possessions of the
ecclesiastical princes in central Germany, which were eventually to be
secularized, she yielded to France undisputed possession of the left
bank of the Rhine. Spain, Portugal, and the little states both of
south Germany and of Italy were all alike weary of the contest, the
more so as they were honeycombed with liberal ideas. They were already
preparing to desert England and Austria, the great powers which still
stood firm. With the exception of Portugal, they acceded within a few
weeks to the terms made at Basel. Rome, as the instigator of the
unyielding ecclesiastics of Vendée, was, of course, on the side of
Great Britain and the Empire.
At home the military success of the republic was for a little while
equally marked. Before the close of 1794 the Breton peasants who,
under the name of Chouans, had become lawless highwaymen were entirely
crushed; and the English expedition sent to Quiberon in the following
year to revive the disorders was a complete, almost ridiculous
failure. The insurrection of Vendée had dragged stubbornly on, but it
was stamped out in June, 1795, by the execution of over seven hundred
of the emigrants who had returned on English vessels to fan the
royalist blaze which was kindling again.
[Illustration: In the collection of Mr. Edmond Taigny.
Marie-Josephine-Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, Called Josephine,
Empress of the French.
From the design by Jean-Baptiste Isabey (pencil drawing retouched
in water-color) made in 1798.]
The royalists, having created the panic of five years previous, were
not to be outdone even by the Terror. Charette, the Vendean leader,
retaliated by a holocaust of two thousand republican prisoners whom he
had taken. After the events of Thermidor the Convention had thrown
open the prison doors, put an end to bloodshed, and proclaimed an
amnesty. The evident power of the Parisian burghers, the form given by
the Girondists to the new constitution, the longing of all for peace
and for a return of comfort and prosperity, still further emboldened
the royalists, and enabled them to produce a wide-spread revulsion of
feeling. They rose in many parts of the south, instituting what is
known from the colors they wore as the "White Terror," and pitilessly
murdering, in the desperation of timid revenge, their unsuspecting and
unready neighbors of republican opinions. The scenes enacted were more
terrible, the human butchery was more bloody, than any known during
the darkest days of the revolutionary movement in Paris. This might
well be considered the preliminary trial to the Great White Terror of
1815, in which the frenzy and fanaticism of royalists and Roman
Catholics surpassed the most frantic efforts of radicals in lawless
bloodshed. Imperialists, free-thinkers, and Protestants were the
victims.
The Jacobins, therefore, in view of so dangerous a situation, and not
without some reason, had determined that they themselves should
administer the new constitution. They were in the most desperate
straits because the Paris populace now held them directly responsible
for the existing scarcity of food, a scarcity amounting to famine.
From time to time for months the mob invaded the hall of the
Convention, craving bread with angry, hungry clamor. The members
mingled with the disorderly throng on the floor and temporarily
soothed them by empty promises. But each inroad of disorder was worse
than the preceding until the Mountain was not only without support
from the rabble, but an object of loathing and contempt to them and
their half-starved leaders. Hence their only chance for power was in
some new rearrangement under which they would not be so prominent in
affairs. The royalists at the same time saw in the provisions of the
new charter a means to accomplish their own ends; and relying upon the
attitude of the capital, in which mob and burghers alike were angry,
determined simultaneously to strike a blow for mastery, and to
supplant the Jacobins. Evidence of their activity appeared both in
military and political circles. Throughout the summer of 1795 there
was an unaccountable languor in the army. It was believed that
Pichegru had purposely palsied his own and Jourdan's abilities, and
the needless armistice he made with Austria went far to confirm the
idea. It was afterward proved that several members of the Convention
had been in communication with royalists. Among their agents was a
personage of some importance--a certain Aubry--who, having returned
after the events of Thermidor, never disavowed his real sentiments as
a royalist; and being later made chairman of the army committee, was
in that position when Buonaparte's career was temporarily checked by
degradation from the artillery to the infantry. For this absurd reason
he was long but unjustly thought also to have caused the original
transfer to the west.
The Convention was aware of all that was taking place, but was also
helpless to correct the trouble. Having abolished the powerful and
terrible Committee of Safety, which had conducted its operations with
such success as attends remorseless vigor, it was found necessary on
August ninth to reconstruct something similar to meet the new crisis.
At the same time the spirit of the hour was propitiated by forming
sixteen other committees to control the action of the central one.
Such a dispersion of executive power was a virtual paralysis of
action, but it was to be only temporary, they would soon centralize
their strength in an efficient way. The constitution was adopted only
a fortnight later, on August twenty-second. Immediately the sections
of Paris began to display irritation at the limitations set to their
choice of new representatives. They had many sympathizers in the
provinces, and the extreme reactionaries from the Revolution were
jubilant. Fortunately for France, Carnot was temporarily retained to
control the department of war. He was not removed until the following
March.
When General Buonaparte reached Paris, and went to dwell in the mean
and shabby lodgings which his lean purse compelled him to choose, he
found the city strangely metamorphosed. Animated by a settled purpose
not to accept the position assigned to him in the Army of the West,
and, if necessary, to defy his military superiors, his humor put him
out of all sympathy with the prevalent gaiety. Bitter experience had
taught him that in civil war the consequences of victory and defeat
are alike inglorious. In the fickleness of public opinion the
avenging hero of to-day may easily become the reprobated outcast of
to-morrow. What reputation he had gained at Toulon was already
dissipated in part; the rest might easily be squandered entirely in
Vendée. He felt and said that he could wait. But how about his daily
bread?
The drawing-rooms of Paris had opened like magic before the "sesame"
of Thermidor and the prospects of settled order under the Directory.
There were visiting, dining, and dancing; dressing, flirtation, and
intrigue; walking, driving, and riding--all the avocations of a people
soured with the cruel and bloody past, and reasserting its native
passion for pleasure and refinement. All classes indulged in the
wildest speculation, securities public and corporate were the sport of
the exchange, the gambling spirit absorbed the energies of both sexes
in desperate games of skill and chance. The theaters, which had never
closed their doors even during the worst periods of terror, were
thronged from pit to gallery by a populace that reveled in excitement.
The morality of the hour was no better than the old; for there was a
strange mixture of elements in this new society. The men in power were
of every class--a few of the old aristocracy, many of the wealthy
burghers, a certain proportion of the colonial nabobs from the West
Indies and elsewhere, adventurers of every stripe, a few even of the
city populace, and some country common folk. The purchase and sale of
the confiscated lands, the national domain which furnished a slender
security for the national debt and depreciated bonds, had enriched
thousands of the vulgar sort. The newly rich lost their balance and
their stolidity, becoming as giddy and frivolous and aggressive as the
worst. The ingredients of this queer hodgepodge had yet to learn one
another's language and nature; the niceties of speech, gesture, and
mien which once had a well-understood significance in the higher
circles of government and society were all to be readjusted in
accordance with the ideas of the motley crowd and given new
conventional currency. In such a disorderly transition vice does not
require the mask of hypocrisy, virtue is helpless because unorganized,
and something like riot characterizes conduct. The sound and rugged
goodness of many newcomers, the habitual respectability of the
veterans, were for the moment alike inactive because not yet kneaded
into the lump they had to leaven.
There was, nevertheless, a marvelous exhibition of social power in
this heterogeneous mass; nothing of course proportionate in extent to
what had been brought forth for national defense, but still, of almost
if not entirely equal significance. Throughout the revolutionary epoch
there had been much discussion concerning reforms in education. It was
in 1794 that Monge finally succeeded in founding the great Polytechnic
School, an institution which clearly corresponded to a national
characteristic, since from that day it has strengthened the natural
bias of the French toward applied science, and tempted them to the
undue and unfortunate neglect of many important humanizing
disciplines. The Conservatory of Music and the Institute were
permanently reorganized soon after. The great collections of the
Museum of Arts and Crafts (Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers) were
begun, and permanent lecture courses were founded in connection with
the National Library, the Botanical Garden, the Medical School, and
other learned institutions. Almost immediately a philosophical
literature began to appear; pictures were painted, and the theaters
reopened with new and tolerable pieces written for the day and place.
In the very midst of war, moreover, an attempt was made to emancipate
the press. The effort was ill advised, and the results were so
deplorable for the conduct of affairs that the newspapers were in the
event more firmly muzzled than ever.
When Buonaparte had made his living arrangements, and began to look
about, he must have been stupefied by the hatred for the Convention so
generally and openly manifested on every side. The provinces had
looked upon the Revolution as accomplished. Paris was evidently in
such ill humor with the body which represented it that the republic
was to all appearance virtually undone. "Reëlect two thirds of the
Convention members to the new legislature!" said the angry demagogues
of the Paris sections. "Never! Those men who, by their own confession,
have for three years in all these horrors been the cowardly tools of a
sentiment they could not restrain, but are now self-styled and
reformed moderates! Impossible!" Whether bribed by foreign gold, and
working under the influence of royalists, or by reason of the famine,
or through the determination of the well-to-do to have a radical
change, or from all these influences combined, the sections were
gradually organizing for resistance, and it was soon clear that the
National Guard was in sympathy with them. The Convention was equally
alert, and began to arm for the conflict. They already had several
hundred artillerymen and five thousand regulars who were imbued with
the national rather that the local spirit; they now began to enlist a
special guard of fifteen hundred from the desperate men who had been
the trusty followers of Hébert and Robespierre. The fighting spirit of
the Convention was unquenchable. Having lodged the "two thirds" in the
coming government, they virtually declared war on all enemies internal
and external. By their decree of October twenty-fourth, 1792, they had
announced that the natural limits of France were their goal. Having
virtually obtained them, they were now determined to defend them. This
was the legacy of the Convention to the Directory, a legacy which
indefinitely prolonged the Revolution and nullified the new polity
from the outset.
For a month or more Buonaparte was a mere onlooker, or at most an
interested examiner of events, weighing and speculating in obscurity
much as he had done three years before. The war department listened to
and granted his earnest request that he might remain in Paris until
there should be completed a general reassignment of officers, which
had been determined upon, and, as his good fortune would have it, was
already in progress. As the first weeks passed, news arrived from the
south of a reaction in favor of the Jacobins. It became clearer every
day that the Convention had moral support beyond the ramparts of
Paris, and within the city it was possible to maintain something in
the nature of a Jacobin salon. Many of that faith who were disaffected
with the new conditions in Paris--the Corsicans in particular--were
welcomed at the home of Mme. Permon by herself and her beautiful
daughter, afterward Mme. Junot and Duchess of Abrantès. Salicetti had
chosen the other child, a son now grown, as his private secretary, and
was of course a special favorite in the house. The first manifestation
of reviving Jacobin confidence was shown in the attack made on May
twentieth upon the Convention by hungry rioters who shouted for the
constitution of 1793. The result was disastrous to the radicals
because the tumult was quelled by the courage and presence of mind
shown by Boissy d'Anglas, a calm and determined moderate. Commissioned
to act alone in provisioning Paris, he bravely accepted his
responsibility and mounted the president's chair in the midst of the
tumult to defend himself. The mob brandished in his face the bloody
head of Féraud, a fellow-member of his whom they had just murdered.
The speaker uncovered his head in respect, and his undaunted mien
cowed the leaders, who slunk away, followed by the rabble. The
consequence was a total annihilation of the Mountain on May
twenty-second. The Convention committees were disbanded, their
artillerymen were temporarily dismissed, and the constitution of 1793
was abolished.
The friendly home of Mme. Permon was almost the only resort of
Buonaparte, who, though disillusioned, was still a Jacobin. Something
like desperation appeared in his manner; the lack of proper food
emaciated his frame, while uncertainty as to the future left its mark
on his wan face and in his restless eyes. It was not astonishing, for
his personal and family affairs were apparently hopeless. His
brothers, like himself, had now been deprived of profitable
employment; they, with him, might possibly and even probably soon be
numbered among the suspects; destitute of a powerful patron, and with
his family once more in actual want, Napoleon was scarcely fit in
either garb or humor for the society even of his friends. His hostess
described him as having "sharp, angular features; small hands, long
and thin; his hair long and disheveled; without gloves; wearing badly
made, badly polished shoes; having always a sickly appearance, which
was the result of his lean and yellow complexion, brightened only by
two eyes glistening with shrewdness and firmness." Bourrienne, who had
now returned from diplomatic service, was not edified by the
appearance or temper of his acquaintance, who, he says, "was ill clad
and slovenly, his character cold, often inscrutable. His smile was
hollow and often out of place. He had moments of fierce gaiety which
made you uneasy, and indisposed to love him."
No wonder the man was ill at ease. His worst fears were realized when
the influence of the Mountain was wiped out,--Carnot, the organizer of
victory, as he had been styled, being the only one of all the old
leaders to escape. Salicetti was too prominent a partizan to be
overlooked by the angry burghers. For a time he was concealed by Mme.
Permon in her Paris home. He escaped the vengeance of his enemies in
the disguise of her lackey, flying with her when she left for the
south to seek refuge for herself and children. Even the rank and file
among the members of the Mountain either fled or were arrested. That
Buonaparte was unmolested appears to prove how cleverly he had
concealed his connection with them. The story that in these days he
proposed for the hand of Mme. Permon, though without any corroborative
evidence, has an air of probability, partly in the consideration of a
despair which might lead him to seek any support, even that of a wife
as old as his mother, partly from the existence of a letter to the
lady which, though enigmatical, displays an interesting mixture of
wounded pride and real or pretended jealousy. The epistle is dated
June eighteenth, 1795. He felt that she would think him duped, he
explains, if he did not inform her that although she had not seen fit
to give her confidence to him, he had all along known that she had
Salicetti in hiding. Then follows an address to that countryman,
evidently intended to clear the writer from all taint of Jacobinism,
and couched in these terms: "I could have denounced thee, but did not,
although it would have been but a just revenge so to do. Which has
chosen the truer part? Go, seek in peace an asylum where thou canst
return to better thoughts of thy country. My lips shall never utter
thy name. Repent, and above all, appreciate my motives. This I
deserve, for they are noble and generous." In these words to the
political refugee he employs the familiar republican "thou"; in the
peroration, addressed, like the introduction, to the lady herself, he
recurs to the polite and distant "you." "Mme. Permon, my good wishes
go with you as with your child. You are two feeble creatures with no
defense. May Providence and the prayers of a friend be with you. Above
all, be prudent and never remain in the large cities. Adieu. Accept my
friendly greetings."[49]
[Footnote 49: Correspondance, I, No. 40.]
The meaning of this missive is recondite; perhaps it is this: Mme.
Permon, I loved you, and could have ruined the rival who is your
protégé with a clear conscience, for he once did me foul wrong, as he
will acknowledge. But farewell. I bear you no grudge. Or else it may
announce another change in the political weather by the veering of the
cock. As a good citizen, despising the horrors of the past, I could
have denounced you, Salicetti. I did not, for I recalled old times and
your helplessness, and wished to heap coals of fire on your head, that
you might see the error of your way. The latter interpretation finds
support in the complete renunciation of Jacobinism which the writer
made soon afterward, and in his subsequent labored explanation that in
the "Supper of Beaucaire" he had not identified himself with the
Jacobin soldier (so far an exact statement of fact), but had wished
only by a dispassionate presentation of facts to show the hopeless
case of Marseilles, and to prevent useless bloodshed.