"Memoires de Bertrand Barere": publies par MM. Hippolyte
Carnot, Membre de la Chambre des Deputes, et David d'Angers,
Membre de l'Institut: precedes d'une Notice Historique par
H. Carnot. 4 tomes. Paris: 1843.
This book has more than one title to our serious attention. It is an
appeal, solemnly made to posterity by a man who played a conspicuous
part in great events, and who represents himself as deeply aggrieved by
the rash and malevolent censure of his contemporaries. To such an appeal
we shall always give ready audience. We can perform no duty more useful
to society, or more agreeable to our own feelings, than that of making,
as far as our power extends, reparation to the slandered and
persecuted benefactors of mankind. We therefore promptly took into our
consideration this copious apology for the life of Bertrand Barere. We
have made up our minds; and we now purpose to do him, by the blessing of
God, full and signal justice. It is to be observed that the appellant in
this case does not come into court alone. He is attended to the bar
of public opinion by two compurgators who occupy highly honourable
stations. One of these is M. David of Angers, member of the institute,
an eminent sculptor, and, if we have been rightly informed, a favourite
pupil, though not a kinsman, of the painter who bore the same name. The
other, to whom we owe the biographical preface, is M. Hippolyte Carnot,
member of the Chamber of Deputies, and son of the celebrated Director.
In the judgment of M. David and of M. Hippolyte Carnot, Barere was a
deserving and an ill-used man--a man who, though by no means faultless,
must yet, when due allowance is made for the force of circumstances and
the infirmity of human nature, be considered as on the whole entitled
to our esteem. It will be for the public to determine, after a full
hearing, whether the editors have, by thus connecting their names with
that of Barere, raised his character or lowered their own.
We are not conscious that, when we opened this book, we were under the
influence of any feeling likely to pervert our judgment. Undoubtedly we
had long entertained a most unfavourable opinion of Barere: but to this
opinion we were not tied by any passion or by any interest. Our dislike
was a reasonable dislike, and might have been removed by reason. Indeed
our expectation was, that these Memoirs would in some measure clear
Barere's fame. That he could vindicate himself from all the charges
which had been brought against him, we knew to be impossible; and his
editors admit that he has not done so. But we thought it highly probable
that some grave accusations would be refuted, and that many offences
to which he would have been forced to plead guilty would be greatly
extenuated. We were not disposed to be severe. We were fully aware that
temptations such as those to which the members of the Convention and
of the Committee of Public Safety were exposed must try severely the
strength of the firmest virtue. Indeed our inclination has always been
to regard with an indulgence, which to some rigid moralists appears
excessive, those faults into which gentle and noble spirits are
sometimes hurried by the excitement of conflict, by the maddening
influence of sympathy, and by ill-regulated zeal for a public cause.
With such feelings we read this book, and compared it with other
accounts of the events in which Barere bore a part. It is now our duty
to express the opinion to which this investigation has led us.
Our opinion then is this: that Barere approached nearer than any person
mentioned in history or fiction, whether man or devil, to the idea of
consummate and universal depravity. In him the qualities which are the
proper objects of hatred, and the qualities which are the proper objects
of contempt, preserve an exquisite and absolute harmony. In almost every
particular sort of wickedness he has had rivals. His sensuality was
immoderate; but this was a failing common to him with many great and
amiable men. There have been many men as cowardly as he, some as cruel,
a few as mean, a few as impudent. There may also have been as great
liars, though we never met with them or read of them. But when we put
everything together, sensuality, poltroonery, baseness, effrontery,
mendacity, barbarity, the result is something which in a novel we should
condemn as caricature, and to which, we venture to say, no parallel can
be found in history.
It would be grossly unjust, we acknowledge, to try a man situated as
Barere was by a severe standard. Nor have we done so. We have formed
our opinion of him, by comparing him, not with politicians of stainless
character, not with Chancellor D'Aguesseau, or General Washington, or Mr
Wilberforce, or Earl Grey, but with his own colleagues of the Mountain.
That party included a considerable number of the worst men that ever
lived; but we see in it nothing like Barere. Compared with him, Fouche
seems honest; Billaud seems humane; Hebert seems to rise into dignity.
Every other chief of a party, says M. Hippolyte Carnot, has found
apologists: one set of men exalts the Girondists; another set justifies
Danton; a third deifies Robespierre: but Barere has remained without
a defender. We venture to suggest a very simple solution of this
phenomenon. All the other chiefs of parties had some good qualities; and
Barere had none. The genius, courage, patriotism, and humanity of the
Girondist statesmen more than atoned for what was culpable in their
conduct, and should have protected them from the insult of being
compared with such a thing as Barere. Danton and Robespierre were indeed
bad men; but in both of them some important parts of the mind remained
sound. Danton was brave and resolute, fond of pleasure, of power, and of
distinction, with vehement passions, with lax principles, but with some
kind and manly feelings, capable of great crimes, but capable also of
friendship and of compassion. He, therefore, naturally finds admirers
among persons of bold and sanguine dispositions. Robespierre was a
vain, envious, and suspicious man, with a hard heart, weak nerves, and a
gloomy temper. But we cannot with truth deny that he was, in the vulgar
sense of the word, disinterested, that his private life was correct, or
that he was sincerely zealous for his own system of politics and morals.
He, therefore, naturally finds admirers among honest but moody and
bitter democrats. If no class has taken the reputation of Barere under
its patronage, the reason is plain: Barere had not a single virtue, nor
even the semblance of one.
It is true that he was not, as far as we are able to judge, originally
of a savage disposition; but this circumstance seems to us only to
aggravate his guilt. There are some unhappy men constitutionally prone
to the darker passions, men all whose blood is gall, and to whom bitter
words and harsh actions are as natural as snarling and biting to a
ferocious dog. To come into the world with this wretched mental disease
is a greater calamity than to be born blind or deaf. A man who, having
such a temper, keeps it in subjection, and constrains himself to behave
habitually with justice and humanity towards those who are in his power,
seems to us worthy of the highest admiration. There have been instances
of this self-command; and they are among the most signal triumphs of
philosophy and religion. On the other hand, a man who, having been
blessed by nature with a bland disposition, gradually brings himself
to inflict misery on his fellow-creatures with indifference, with
satisfaction, and at length with a hideous rapture, deserves to be
regarded as a portent of wickedness; and such a man was Barere. The
history of his downward progress is full of instruction. Weakness,
cowardice, and fickleness were born with him; the best quality which he
received from nature was a good temper. These, it is true, are not
very promising materials; yet, out of materials as unpromising, high
sentiments of piety and of honour have sometimes made martyrs and
heroes. Rigid principles often do for feeble minds what stays do for
feeble bodies. But Barere had no principles at all. His character was
equally destitute of natural and of acquired strength. Neither in the
commerce of life, nor in books, did we ever become acquainted with
any mind so unstable, so utterly destitute of tone, so incapable of
independent thought and earnest preference, so ready to take impressions
and so ready to lose them. He resembled those creepers which must lean
on something, and which, as soon as their prop is removed, fall down in
utter helplessness. He could no more stand up, erect and self-supported,
in any cause, than the ivy can rear itself like the oak, or the wild
vine shoot to heaven like the cedar of Lebanon. It is barely possible
that, under good guidance and in favourable circumstances, such a man
might have slipped through life without discredit. But the unseaworthy
craft, which even in still water would have been in danger of going down
from its own rottenness, was launched on a raging ocean, amidst a storm
in which a whole armada of gallant ships was cast away. The weakest and
most servile of human beings found himself on a sudden an actor in a
Revolution which convulsed the whole civilised world. At first he fell
under the influence of humane and moderate men, and talked the language
of humanity and moderation. But he soon found himself surrounded by
fierce and resolute spirits, scared by no danger and restrained by no
scruple. He had to choose whether he would be their victim or their
accomplice. His choice was soon made. He tasted blood, and felt no
loathing; he tasted it again, and liked it well. Cruelty became with
him, first a habit, then a passion, at last a madness. So complete and
rapid was the degeneracy of his nature, that within a very few months
after the time when he had passed for a good-natured man, he had brought
himself to look on the despair and misery of his fellow-creatures with
a glee resembling that of the fiends whom Dante saw watching the pool
of seething pitch in Malebolge. He had many associates in guilt; but he
distinguished himself from them all by the Bacchanalian exaltation which
he seemed to feel in the work of death. He was drunk with innocent and
noble blood, laughed and shouted as he butchered, and howled strange
songs and reeled in strange dances amidst the carnage. Then came a
sudden and violent turn of fortune. The miserable man was hurled down
from the height of power to hopeless ruin and infamy. The shock sobered
him at once. The fumes of his horrible intoxication passed away. But he
was now so irrecoverably depraved that the discipline of adversity only
drove him further into wickedness. Ferocious vices, of which he had
never been suspected, had been developed in him by power. Another class
of vices, less hateful perhaps, but more despicable, was now developed
in him by poverty and disgrace. Having appalled the whole world by great
crimes perpetrated under the pretence of zeal for liberty, he became
the meanest of all the tools of despotism. It is not easy to settle the
order of precedence among his vices, but we are inclined to think that
his baseness was, on the whole, a rarer and more marvellous thing than
his cruelty.
This is the view which we have long taken of Barere's character; but,
till we read these Memoirs, we held our opinion with the diffidence
which becomes a judge who has only heard one side. The case seemed
strong, and in parts unanswerable; yet we did not know what the accused
party might have to say for himself; and, not being much inclined to
take our fellow-creatures either for angels of light or for angels of
darkness, we could not but feel some suspicion that his offences had
been exaggerated. That suspicion is now at an end. The vindication is
before us. It occupies four volumes. It was the work of forty years. It
would be absurd to suppose that it does not refute every serious charge
which admitted of refutation. How many serious charges, then, are here
refuted? Not a single one. Most of the imputations which have been
thrown on Barere he does not even notice. In such cases, of course,
judgment must go against him by default. The fact is, that nothing can
be more meagre and uninteresting than his account of the great public
transactions in which he was engaged. He gives us hardly a word of
new information respecting the proceedings of the Committee of Public
Safety; and, by way of compensation, tells us long stories about things
which happened before he emerged from obscurity, and after he had again
sunk into it. Nor is this the worst. As soon as he ceases to write
trifles, he begins to write lies; and such lies! A man who has never
been within the tropics does not know what a thunderstorm means; a man
who has never looked on Niagara has but a faint idea of a cataract; and
he who has not read Barere's Memoirs may be said not to know what it
is to lie. Among the numerous classes which make up the great genus
Mendacium, the Mendacium Vasconicum, or Gascon lie, has, during some
centuries, been highly esteemed as peculiarly circumstantial and
peculiarly impudent; and, among the Mendacia Vasconica, the Mendacium
Barerianum is, without doubt, the finest species. It is indeed a superb
variety, and quite throws into the shade some Mendacia which we were
used to regard with admiration. The Mendacium Wraxallianum, for example,
though by no means to be despised, will not sustain the comparison for a
moment. Seriously, we think that M. Hippolyte Carnot is much to blame in
this matter. We can hardly suppose him to be worse read than ourselves
in the history of the Convention, a history which must interest him
deeply, not only as a Frenchman, but also as a son. He must, therefore,
be perfectly aware that many of the most important statements which
these volumes contain are falsehoods, such as Corneille's Dorante, or
Moliere's Scapin, or Colin d'Harleville's Monsieur de Crac would have
been ashamed to utter. We are far, indeed, from holding M. Hippolyte
Carnot answerable for Barere's want of veracity; but M. Hippolyte
Carnot has arranged these Memoirs, has introduced them to the world by
a laudatory preface, has described them as documents of great historical
value, and has illustrated them by notes. We cannot but think that, by
acting thus, he contracted some obligations of which he does not seem
to have been at all aware; and that he ought not to have suffered any
monstrous fiction to go forth under the sanction of his name, without
adding a line at the foot of the page for the purpose of cautioning the
reader.
We will content ourselves at present with pointing out two instances
of Barere's wilful and deliberate mendacity; namely, his account of
the death of Marie Antoinette, and his account of the death of
the Girondists. His account of the death of Marie Antoinette is as
follows:--"Robespierre in his turn proposed that the members of the
Capet family should be banished, and that Marie Antoinette should be
brought to trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal. He would have
been better employed in concerting military measures which might have
repaired our disasters in Belgium, and might have arrested the progress
of the enemies of the Revolution in the west."--(Volume ii. page 312.)
Now, it is notorious that Marie Antoinette was sent before the
Revolutionary Tribunal, not at Robespierre's instance, but in direct
opposition to Robespierre's wishes. We will cite a single authority,
which is quite decisive. Bonaparte, who had no conceivable motive to
disguise the truth, who had the best opportunities of knowing the truth,
and who, after his marriage with the Archduchess, naturally felt an
interest in the fate of his wife's kinswomen, distinctly affirmed that
Robespierre opposed the trying of the Queen. (O'Meara's "Voice from St
Helena", ii. 170.) Who, then, was the person who really did propose that
the Capet family should be banished, and that Marie Antoinette should
be tried? Full information will be found in the "Moniteur". ("Moniteur",
2d, 7th and 9th of August, 1793.) From that valuable record it appears
that, on the first of August 1793, an orator, deputed by the Committee
of Public Safety, addressed the Convention in a long and elaborate
discourse. He asked, in passionate language, how it happened that the
enemies of the Republic still continued to hope for success. "Is it,"
he cried, "because we have too long forgotten the crimes of the Austrian
woman? Is it because we have shown so strange an indulgence to the race
of our ancient tyrants? It is time that this unwise apathy should cease;
it is time to extirpate from the soil of the Republic the last roots of
royalty. As for the children of Louis the conspirator, they are hostages
for the Republic. The charge of their maintenance shall be reduced to
what is necessary for the food and keep of two individuals. The public
treasure shall no longer be lavished on creatures who have too long been
considered as privileged. But behind them lurks a woman who has been the
cause of all the disasters of France, and whose share in every project
adverse to the revolution has long been known. National justice claims
its rights over her. It is to the tribunal appointed for the trial
of conspirators that she ought to be sent. It is only by striking
the Austrian woman that you can make Francis and George, Charles and
William, sensible of the crimes which their ministers and their armies
have committed." The speaker concluded by moving that Marie Antoinette
should be brought to judgment, and should, for that end, be forthwith
transferred to the Conciergerie; and that all the members of the house
of Capet, with the exception of those who were under the sword of the
law, and of the two children of Louis, should be banished from the
French territory. The motion was carried without debate.
Now, who was the person who made this speech and this motion? It was
Barere himself. It is clear, then, that Barere attributed his own mean
insolence and barbarity to one who, whatever his crimes may have been,
was in this matter innocent. The only question remaining is, whether
Barere was misled by his memory, or wrote a deliberate falsehood.
We are convinced that he wrote a deliberate falsehood. His memory is
described by his editors as remarkably good, and must have been bad
indeed if he could not remember such a fact as this. It is true that the
number of murders in which he subsequently bore a part was so great that
he might well confound one with another, that he might well forget what
part of the daily hecatomb was consigned to death by himself, and what
part by his colleagues. But two circumstances make it quite incredible
that the share which he took in the death of Marie Antoinette should
have escaped his recollection. She was one of his earliest victims.
She was one of his most illustrious victims. The most hardened assassin
remembers the first time that he shed blood; and the widow of Louis
was no ordinary sufferer. If the question had been about some milliner,
butchered for hiding in her garret her brother who had let drop a word
against the Jacobin Club--if the question had been about some old nun,
dragged to death for having mumbled what were called fanatical words
over her beads--Barere's memory might well have deceived him. It would
be as unreasonable to expect him to remember all the wretches whom
he slew as all the pinches of snuff that he took. But, though Barere
murdered many hundreds of human beings, he murdered only one Queen. That
he, a small country lawyer, who, a few years before, would have thought
himself honoured by a glance or a word from the daughter of so many
Caesars, should call her the Austrian woman, should send her from jail
to jail, should deliver her over to the executioner, was surely a great
event in his life. Whether he had reason to be proud of it or ashamed of
it, is a question on which we may perhaps differ from his editors; but
they will admit, we think, that he could not have forgotten it.
We, therefore, confidently charge Barere with having written a
deliberate falsehood; and we have no hesitation in saying that we never,
in the course of any historical researches that we have happened to
make, fell in with a falsehood so audacious, except only the falsehood
which we are about to expose.
Of the proceeding against the Girondists, Barere speaks with just
severity. He calls it an atrocious injustice perpetrated against the
legislators of the republic. He complains that distinguished deputies,
who ought to have been readmitted to their seats in the Convention, were
sent to the scaffold as conspirators. The day, he exclaims, was a day
of mourning for France. It mutilated the national representation; it
weakened the sacred principle, that the delegates of the people were
inviolable. He protests that he had no share in the guilt. "I have had,"
he says, "the patience to go through the 'Moniteur', extracting all the
charges brought against deputies, and all the decrees for arresting and
impeaching deputies. Nowhere will you find my name. I never brought a
charge against any of my colleagues, or made a report against any, or
drew up an impeachment against any." (Volume ii. 407.)
Now, we affirm that this is a lie. We affirm that Barere himself took
the lead in the proceedings of the Convention against the Girondists. We
affirm that he, on the twenty-eighth of July 1793, proposed a decree
for bringing nine Girondist deputies to trial, and for putting to death
sixteen other Girondist deputies without any trial at all. We affirm
that, when the accused deputies had been brought to trial, and when some
apprehension arose that their eloquence might produce an effect even on
the Revolutionary Tribunal, Barere did, on the 8th of Brumaire, second
a motion for a decree authorising the tribunal to decide without hearing
out the defence; and, for the truth of every one of these things so
affirmed by us, we appeal to the very "Moniteur" to which Barere has
dared to appeal. ("Moniteur", 31st of July 1793, and Nonidi, first
Decade of Brumaire, in the year 2(?).)
What M. Hippolyte Carnot, knowing, as he must know, that this book
contains such falsehoods as those which we have exposed, can have meant,
when he described it as a valuable addition to our stock of historical
information, passes our comprehension. When a man is not ashamed to tell
lies about events which took place before hundreds of witnesses, and
which are recorded in well-known and accessible books, what credit can
we give to his account of things done in corners? No historian who does
not wish to be laughed at will ever cite the unsupported authority of
Barere as sufficient to prove any fact whatever. The only thing, as far
as we can see, on which these volumes throw any light, is the exceeding
baseness of the author.
So much for the veracity of the Memoirs. In a literary point of view,
they are beneath criticism. They are as shallow, flippant, and affected,
as Barere's oratory in the Convention. They are also, what his oratory
in the Convention was not, utterly insipid. In fact, they are the mere
dregs and rinsings of a bottle of which even the first froth was but of
very questionable flavour.
We will now try to present our readers with a sketch of this man's life.
We shall, of course, make very sparing use indeed of his own Memoirs;
and never without distrust, except where they are confirmed by other
evidence.
Bertrand Barere was born in the year 1755, at Tarbes in Gascony. His
father was the proprietor of a small estate at Vieuzac, in the beautiful
vale of Argeles. Bertrand always loved to be called Barere de Vieuzac,
and flattered himself with the hope that, by the help of this feudal
addition to his name, he might pass for a gentleman. He was educated for
the bar at Toulouse, the seat of one of the most celebrated parliaments
of the kingdom, practised as an advocate with considerable success,
and wrote some small pieces, which he sent to the principal literary
societies in the south of France. Among provincial towns, Toulouse seems
to have been remarkably rich in indifferent versifiers and critics. It
gloried especially in one venerable institution, called the Academy of
the Floral Games. This body held every year a grand meeting which was a
subject of intense interest to the whole city, and at which flowers
of gold and silver were given as prizes for odes, for idyls, and for
something that was called eloquence. These bounties produced of course
the ordinary effect of bounties, and turned people who might have been
thriving attorneys and useful apothecaries into small wits and bad
poets. Barere does not appear to have been so lucky as to obtain any of
these precious flowers; but one of his performances was mentioned with
honour. At Montauban he was more fortunate. The academy of that town
bestowed on him several prizes, one for a panegyric on Louis the
Twelfth, in which the blessings of monarchy and the loyalty of the
French nation were set forth; and another for a panegyric on poor Franc
de Pompignan, in which, as may easily be supposed, the philosophy of the
eighteenth century was sharply assailed. Then Barere found an old stone
inscribed with three Latin words, and wrote a dissertation upon it,
which procured him a seat in a learned Assembly, called the Toulouse
Academy of Sciences, Inscriptions, and Polite Literature. At length the
doors of the Academy of the Floral Games were opened to so much
merit. Barere, in his thirty-third year, took his seat as one of that
illustrious brotherhood, and made an inaugural oration which was greatly
admired. He apologises for recounting these triumphs of his youthful
genius. We own that we cannot blame him for dwelling long on the least
disgraceful portion of his existence. To send in declamations for prizes
offered by provincial academies is indeed no very useful or dignified
employment for a bearded man; but it would have been well if Barere had
always been so employed.
In 1785 he married a young lady of considerable fortune. Whether she was
in other respects qualified to make a home happy, is a point respecting
which we are imperfectly informed. In a little work, entitled
"Melancholy Pages", which was written in 1797, Barere avers that his
marriage was one of mere convenience, that at the altar his heart was
heavy with sorrowful forebodings, that he turned pale as he pronounced
the solemn "Yes," that unbidden tears rolled down his cheeks, that his
mother shared his presentiment, and that the evil omen was accomplished.
"My marriage," he says, "was one of the most unhappy of marriages." So
romantic a tale, told by so noted a liar, did not command our belief. We
were, therefore, not much surprised to discover that, in his Memoirs,
he calls his wife a most amiable woman, and declares that, after he
had been united to her six years, he found her as amiable as ever. He
complains, indeed, that she was too much attached to royalty and to the
old superstition; but he assures us that his respect for her virtues
induced him to tolerate her prejudices. Now Barere, at the time of his
marriage, was himself a Royalist and a Catholic. He had gained one prize
by flattering the Throne, and another by defending the Church. It is
hardly possible, therefore, that disputes about politics or religion
should have embittered his domestic life till some time after he became
a husband. Our own guess is, that his wife was, as he says, a virtuous
and amiable woman, and that she did her best to make him happy during
some years. It seems clear that, when circumstances developed the latent
atrocity of his character, she could no longer endure him, refused to
see him, and sent back his letters unopened. Then it was, we imagine,
that he invented the fable about his distress on his wedding day.
In 1788 Barere paid his first visit to Paris, attended reviews, heard
Laharpe at the Lycaeum, and Condorcet at the Academy of Sciences, stared
at the envoys of Tippoo Sahib, saw the Royal Family dine at Versailles,
and kept a journal in which he noted down adventures and speculations.
Some parts of this journal are printed in the first volume of the work
before us, and are certainly most characteristic. The worst vices of
the writer had not yet shown themselves; but the weakness which was
the parent of those vices appears in every line. His levity, his
inconsistency, his servility, were already what they were to the
last. All his opinions, all his feelings, spin round and round like a
weathercock in a whirlwind. Nay, the very impressions which he receives
through his senses are not the same two days together. He sees Louis
the Sixteenth, and is so much blinded by loyalty as to find his Majesty
handsome. "I fixed my eyes," he says, "with a lively curiosity on his
fine countenance, which I thought open and noble." The next time that
the king appears all is altered. His Majesty's eyes are without the
smallest expression; he has a vulgar laugh which seems like idiocy, an
ignoble figure, an awkward gait, and the look of a big boy ill brought
up. It is the same with more important questions. Barere is for the
parliaments on the Monday and against the parliaments on the Tuesday,
for feudality in the morning and against feudality in the afternoon. One
day he admires the English constitution; then he shudders to think
that, in the struggles by which that constitution had been obtained, the
barbarous islanders had murdered a king, and gives the preference to
the constitution of Bearn. Bearn, he says, has a sublime constitution, a
beautiful constitution. There the nobility and clergy meet in one house,
and the Commons in another. If the houses differ, the King has
the casting vote. A few weeks later we find him raving against the
principles of this sublime and beautiful constitution. To admit deputies
of the nobility and clergy into the legislature is, he says, neither
more nor less than to admit enemies of the nation into the legislature.
In this state of mind, without one settled purpose or opinion, the
slave of the last word, royalist, aristocrat, democrat, according to the
prevailing sentiment of the coffee-house or drawing-room into which he
had just looked, did Barere enter into public life. The States-General
had been summoned. Barere went down to his own province, was there
elected one of the representatives of the Third Estate, and returned to
Paris in May 1789.
A great crisis, often predicted, had at last arrived. In no country,
we conceive, have intellectual freedom and political servitude existed
together so long as in France, during the seventy or eighty years which
preceded the last convocation of the Orders. Ancient abuses and new
theories flourished in equal vigour side by side. The people, having no
constitutional means of checking even the most flagitious misgovernment,
were indemnified for oppression by being suffered to luxuriate in
anarchical speculation, and to deny or ridicule every principle on which
the institutions of the State reposed. Neither those who attribute the
downfall of the old French institutions to the public grievances, nor
those who attribute it to the doctrines of the philosophers, appear
to us to have taken into their view more than one half of the subject.
Grievances as heavy have often been endured without producing a
revolution; doctrines as bold have often been propounded without
producing a revolution. The question, whether the French nation was
alienated from its old polity by the follies and vices of the Viziers
and Sultanas who pillaged and disgraced it, or by the writings of
Voltaire and Rousseau, seems to us as idle as the question whether it
was fire or gunpowder that blew up the mills at Hounslow. Neither
cause would have sufficed alone. Tyranny may last through ages where
discussion is suppressed. Discussion may safely be left free by rulers
who act on popular principles. But combine a press like that of London
with a government like that of St Petersburg; and the inevitable effect
will be an explosion that will shake the world. So it was in France.
Despotism and License, mingling in unblessed union, engendered that
mighty Revolution in which the lineaments of both parents were strangely
blended. The long gestation was accomplished; and Europe saw, with mixed
hope and terror, that agonising travail and that portentous birth.
Among the crowd of legislators which at this conjuncture poured from all
the provinces of France into Paris, Barere made no contemptible figure.
The opinions which he for the moment professed were popular, yet not
extreme. His character was fair; his personal advantages are said to
have been considerable; and, from the portrait which is prefixed
to these Memoirs, and which represents him as he appeared in the
Convention, we would judge that his features must have been strikingly
handsome, though we think that we can read in them cowardice and
meanness very legibly written by the hand of God. His conversation was
lively and easy; his manners remarkably good for a country lawyer. Women
of rank and wit said that he was the only man who, on his first arrival
from a remote province, had that indescribable air which it was supposed
that Paris alone could give. His eloquence, indeed, was by no means so
much admired in the capital as it had been by the ingenious academicians
of Montauban and Toulouse. His style was thought very bad; and very bad,
if a foreigner may venture to judge, it continued to the last. It would,
however, be unjust to deny that he had some talents for speaking and
writing. His rhetoric, though deformed by every imaginable fault of
taste, from bombast down to buffoonery, was not wholly without force
and vivacity. He had also one quality which, in active life, often gives
fourth-rate men an advantage over first-rate men. Whatever he could do,
he could do without effort, at any moment, in any abundance, and on any
side of any question. There was, indeed, a perfect harmony between his
moral character and his intellectual character. His temper was that of
a slave; his abilities were exactly those which qualified him to be a
useful slave. Of thinking to purpose, he was utterly incapable; but he
had wonderful readiness in arranging and expressing thoughts furnished
by others.
In the National Assembly he had no opportunity of displaying the full
extent either of his talents or of his vices. He was indeed eclipsed
by much abler men. He went, as was his habit, with the stream, spoke
occasionally with some success, and edited a journal called the "Point
du Jour", in which the debates of the Assembly were reported.
He at first ranked by no means among the violent reformers. He was not
friendly to that new division of the French territory which was among
the most important changes introduced by the Revolution, and was
especially unwilling to see his native province dismembered. He was
entrusted with the task of framing Reports on the Woods and Forests.
Louis was exceedingly anxious about this matter; for his majesty was a
keen sportsman, and would much rather have gone without the Veto, or
the prerogative of making peace and war, than without his hunting and
shooting. Gentlemen of the royal household were sent to Barere, in
order to intercede for the deer and pheasants. Nor was this intercession
unsuccessful. The reports were so drawn that Barere was afterwards
accused of having dishonestly sacrificed the interests of the public
to the tastes of the court. To one of these reports he had the
inconceivable folly and bad taste to prefix a punning motto from Virgil,
fit only for such essays as he had been in the habit of composing for
the Floral Games--
"Si canimus sylvas, sylvae sint Consule dignae."
This literary foppery was one of the few things in which he was
consistent. Royalist or Girondist, Jacobin or Imperialist, he was always
a Trissotin.
As the monarchical party became weaker and weaker, Barere gradually
estranged himself more and more from it, and drew closer and closer to
the republicans. It would seem that, during this transition, he was for
a time closely connected with the family of Orleans. It is certain
that he was entrusted with the guardianship of the celebrated Pamela,
afterwards Lady Edward Fitzgerald; and it was asserted that he received
during some years a pension of twelve thousand francs from the Palais
Royal.
At the end of September 1791, the labours of the National Assembly
terminated, and those of the first and last Legislative Assembly
commenced.
It had been enacted that no member of the National Assembly should sit
in the Legislative Assembly; a preposterous and mischievous regulation,
to which the disasters which followed must in part be ascribed. In
England, what would be thought of a Parliament which did not contain one
single person who had ever sat in parliament before? Yet it may safely
be affirmed that the number of Englishmen who, never having taken
any share in public affairs, are yet well qualified, by knowledge and
observation, to be members of the legislature is at least a hundred
times as great as the number of Frenchmen who were so qualified in 1791.
How, indeed, should it have been otherwise? In England, centuries of
representative government have made all educated people in some measure
statesmen. In France the National Assembly had probably been composed of
as good materials as were then to be found. It had undoubtedly removed a
vast mass of abuses; some of its members had read and thought much about
theories of government; and others had shown great oratorical talents.
But that kind of skill which is required for the constructing,
launching, and steering of a polity was lamentably wanting; for it is a
kind of skill to which practice contributes more than books. Books are
indeed useful to the politician, as they are useful to the navigator and
to the surgeon. But the real navigator is formed on the waves; the real
surgeon is formed at bedsides; and the conflicts of free states are
the real school of constitutional statesmen. The National Assembly had,
however, now served an apprenticeship of two laborious and eventful
years. It had, indeed, by no means finished its education; but it was
no longer, as on the day when it met, altogether rude to political
functions. Its later proceedings contain abundant proof that the members
had profited by their experience. Beyond all doubt there was not in
France any equal number of persons possessing in an equal degree the
qualities necessary for the judicious direction of public affairs; and,
just at this moment, these legislators, misled by a childish wish to
display their own disinterestedness, deserted the duties which they had
half learned, and which nobody else had learned at all, and left their
hall to a second crowd of novices, who had still to master the first
rudiments of political business. When Barere wrote his Memoirs, the
absurdity of this self-denying ordinance had been proved by events, and
was, we believe, acknowledged by all parties. He accordingly, with his
usual mendacity, speaks of it in terms implying that he had opposed it.
There was, he tells us, no good citizen who did not regret this fatal
vote. Nay, all wise men, he says, wished the National Assembly to
continue its sittings as the first Legislative Assembly. But no
attention was paid to the wishes of the enlightened friends of liberty;
and the generous but fatal suicide was perpetrated. Now the fact is,
that Barere, far from opposing this ill-advised measure, was one of
those who most eagerly supported it; that he described it from the
tribune as wise and magnanimous; that he assigned, as his reasons for
taking this view, some of those phrases in which orators of his class
delight, and which, on all men who have the smallest insight into
politics, produce an effect very similar to that of ipecacuanha.
"Those," he said, "who have framed a constitution for their country are,
so to speak, out of the pale of that social state of which they are the
authors; for creative power is not in the same sphere with that which it
has created."
M. Hippolyte Carnot has noticed this untruth, and attributes it to
mere forgetfulness. We leave it to him to reconcile his very charitable
supposition with what he elsewhere says of the remarkable excellence of
Barere's memory.
Many members of the National Assembly were indemnified for the sacrifice
of legislative power by appointments in various departments of the
public service. Of these fortunate persons Barere was one. A high Court
of Appeal had just been instituted. This court was to sit at Paris: but
its jurisdiction was to extend over the whole realm; and the departments
were to choose the judges. Barere was nominated by the department of the
Upper Pyrenees, and took his seat in the Palace of Justice. He asserts,
and our readers may, if they choose, believe, that it was about this
time in contemplation to make him Minister of the Interior, and that in
order to avoid so grave a responsibility, he obtained permission to pay
a visit to his native place. It is certain that he left Paris early in
the year 1792, and passed some months in the south of France.
In the mean time, it became clear that the constitution of 1791 would
not work. It was, indeed, not to be expected that a constitution new
both in its principles and its details would at first work easily. Had
the chief magistrate enjoyed the entire confidence of the people, had he
performed his part with the utmost zeal, fidelity, and ability--had the
representative body included all the wisest statesmen of France, the
difficulties might still have been found insuperable. But, in fact, the
experiment was made under every disadvantage. The King, very naturally,
hated the constitution. In the Legislative Assembly were men of
genius and men of good intentions, but not a single man of experience.
Nevertheless, if France had been suffered to settle her own affairs
without foreign interference, it is possible that the calamities
which followed might have been averted. The King, who, with many good
qualities, was sluggish and sensual, might have found compensation for
his lost prerogatives in his immense civil list, in his palaces and
hunting grounds, in soups, Perigord pies, and champagne. The people,
finding themselves secure in the enjoyment of the valuable reforms which
the National Assembly had, in the midst of all its errors, effected,
would not have been easily excited by demagogues to acts of atrocity;
or, if acts of atrocity had been committed, those acts would probably
have produced a speedy and violent reaction. Had tolerable quiet been
preserved during a few years, the constitution of 1791 might perhaps
have taken root, might have gradually acquired the strength which
time alone can give, and might, with some modifications which were
undoubtedly needed, have lasted down to the present time. The European
coalition against the Revolution extinguished all hope of such a result.
The deposition of Louis was, in our opinion, the necessary consequence
of that coalition. The question was now no longer, whether the King
should have an absolute Veto or a suspensive Veto, whether there
should be one chamber or two chambers, whether the members of the
representative body should be re-eligible or not; but whether France
should belong to the French. The independence of the nation, the
integrity of the territory, were at stake; and we must say plainly that
we cordially approve of the conduct of those Frenchmen who, at that
conjuncture, resolved, like our own Blake, to play the men for their
country, under whatever form of government their country might fall.
It seems to us clear that the war with the Continental coalition was, on
the side of France, at first a defensive war, and therefore a just war.
It was not a war for small objects, or against despicable enemies. On
the event were staked all the dearest interests of the French people.
Foremost among the threatening powers appeared two great and martial
monarchies, either of which, situated as France then was, might be
regarded as a formidable assailant. It is evident that, under such
circumstances, the French could not, without extreme imprudence,
entrust the supreme administration of their affairs to any person
whose attachment to the national cause admitted of doubt. Now, it is no
reproach to the memory of Louis to say that he was not attached to the
national cause. Had he been so, he would have been something more than
man. He had held absolute power, not by usurpation, but by the accident
of birth, and by the ancient polity of the kingdom. That power he had,
on the whole, used with lenity. He had meant well by his people. He had
been willing to make to them, of his own mere motion, concessions such
as scarcely any other sovereign has ever made except under duress.
He had paid the penalty of faults not his own, of the haughtiness and
ambition of some of his predecessors, of the dissoluteness and baseness
of others. He had been vanquished, taken captive, led in triumph, put in
ward. He had escaped; he had been caught; he had been dragged back like
a runaway galley-slave to the oar. He was still a state prisoner. His
quiet was broken by daily affronts and lampoons. Accustomed from the
cradle to be treated with profound reverence, he was now forced to
command his feelings, while men who, a few months before, had been
hackney writers or country attorneys, sat in his presence with covered
heads, and addressed him in the easy tone of equality. Conscious of
fair intentions, sensible of hard usage, he doubtless detested the
Revolution; and, while charged with the conduct of the war against the
confederates, pined in secret for the sight of the German eagles and
the sound of the German drums. We do not blame him for this. But can
we blame those who, being resolved to defend the work of the National
Assembly against the interference of strangers, were not disposed to
have him at their head in the fearful struggle which was approaching?
We have nothing to say in defence or extenuation of the insolence,
injustice, and cruelty with which, after the victory of the republicans,
he and his family were treated. But this we say, that the French had
only one alternative, to deprive him of the powers of first magistrate,
or to ground their arms and submit patiently to foreign dictation.
The events of the tenth of August sprang inevitably from the league of
Pilnitz. The King's palace was stormed; his guards were slaughtered.
He was suspended from his regal functions; and the Legislative Assembly
invited the nation to elect an extraordinary Convention, with the full
powers which the conjuncture required. To this Convention the members
of the National Assembly were eligible; and Barere was chosen by his own
department.
The Convention met on the 21st of September 1792. The first proceedings
were unanimous. Royalty was abolished by acclamation. No objections
were made to this great change; and no reasons were assigned for it. For
certainly we cannot honour with the name of reasons such apophthegms,
as that kings are in the moral world what monsters are in the physical
world; and that the history of kings is the martyrology of nations. But,
though the discussion was worthy only of a debating club of schoolboys,
the resolution to which the Convention came seems to have been that
which sound policy dictated. In saying this, we do not mean to express
an opinion that a republic is, either in the abstract the best form of
government, or is, under ordinary circumstances, the form of government
best suited to the French people. Our own opinion is, that the best
governments which have ever existed in the world have been limited
monarchies; and that France, in particular, has never enjoyed so much
prosperity and freedom as under a limited monarchy. Nevertheless, we
approve of the vote of the Convention which abolished kingly government.
The interference of foreign powers had brought on a crisis which made
extraordinary measures necessary. Hereditary monarchy may be, and we
believe that it is, a very useful institution in a country like France.
And masts are very useful parts of a ship. But, if the ship is on her
beam-ends, it may be necessary to cut the masts away. When once she has
righted, she may come safe into port under jury rigging, and there
be completely repaired. But, in the meantime, she must be hacked with
unsparing hand, lest that which, under ordinary circumstances, is an
essential part of her fabric should, in her extreme distress, sink her
to the bottom. Even so there are political emergencies in which it is
necessary that governments should be mutilated of their fair proportions
for a time, lest they be cast away forever; and with such an emergency
the Convention had to deal. The first object of a good Frenchman should
have been to save France from the fate of Poland. The first requisite of
a government was entire devotion to the national cause. That requisite
was wanting in Louis; and such a want, at such a moment, could not be
supplied by any public or private virtues. If the king were set aside,
the abolition of kingship necessarily followed. In the state in which
the public mind then was, it would have been idle to think of doing what
our ancestors did in 1688, and what the French Chamber of Deputies did
in 1830. Such an attempt would have failed amidst universal derision and
execration. It would have disgusted all zealous men of all opinions; and
there were then few men who were not zealous. Parties fatigued by long
conflict, and instructed by the severe discipline of that school in
which alone mankind will learn, are disposed to listen to the voice of
a mediator. But when they are in their first heady youth, devoid
of experience, fresh for exertion, flushed with hope, burning with
animosity, they agree only in spurning out of their way the daysman who
strives to take his stand between them and to lay his hand upon them
both. Such was in 1792 the state of France. On one side was the great
name of the heir of Hugh Capet, the thirty-third king of the third
race; on the other side was the great name of the republic. There was
no rallying point save these two. It was necessary to make a choice;
and those, in our opinion, judged well who, waving for the moment all
subordinate questions, preferred independence to subjugation, and the
natal soil to the emigrant camp.
As to the abolition of royalty, and as to the vigorous prosecution of
the war, the whole Convention seemed to be united as one man. But a deep
and broad gulf separated the representative body into two great parties.
On one side were those statesmen who are called, from the name of the
department which some of them represented, the Girondists, and, from
the name of one of their most conspicuous leaders, the Brissotines.
In activity and practical ability, Brissot and Gensonne were the most
conspicuous among them. In parliamentary eloquence, no Frenchman of that
time can be considered as equal to Vergniaud. In a foreign country, and
after the lapse of half a century, some parts of his speeches are still
read with mournful admiration. No man, we are inclined to believe, ever
rose so rapidly to such a height of oratorical excellence. His whole
public life lasted barely two years. This is a circumstance which
distinguishes him from our own greatest speakers, Fox, Burke, Pitt,
Sheridan, Windham, Canning. Which of these celebrated men would now be
remembered as an orator, if he had died two years after he first took
his seat in the House of Commons? Condorcet brought to the Girondist
party a different kind of strength. The public regarded him with justice
as an eminent mathematician, and, with less reason, as a great master of
ethical and political science; the philosophers considered him as their
chief, as the rightful heir, by intellectual descent and by solemn
adoption, of their deceased sovereign D'Alembert. In the same ranks were
found Guadet, Isnard, Barbaroux, Buzot, Louvet, too well known as
the author of a very ingenious and very licentious romance, and more
honourably distinguished by the generosity with which he pleaded for the
unfortunate, and by the intrepidity with which he defied the wicked and
powerful. Two persons whose talents were not brilliant, but who enjoyed
a high reputation for probity and public spirit, Petion and Roland, lent
the whole weight of their names to the Girondist connection. The wife of
Roland brought to the deliberations of her husband's friends masculine
courage and force of thought, tempered by womanly grace and vivacity.
Nor was the splendour of a great military reputation wanting to this
celebrated party. Dumourier, then victorious over the foreign invaders,
and at the height of popular favour, must be reckoned among the allies
of the Gironde.
The errors of the Brissotines were undoubtedly neither few nor small;
but, when we fairly compare their conduct with the conduct of any other
party which acted or suffered during the French Revolution, we are
forced to admit their superiority in every quality except that single
quality which in such times prevails over every other, decision. They
were zealous for the great social reform which had been effected by the
National Assembly; and they were right. For, though that reform was, in
some respects, carried too far, it was a blessing well worth even the
fearful price which has been paid for it. They were resolved to maintain
the independence of their country against foreign invaders; and they
were right. For the heaviest of all yokes is the yoke of the stranger.
They thought that, if Louis remained at their head, they could not
carry on with the requisite energy the conflict against the European
coalition. They therefore concurred in establishing a republican
government; and here, again, they were right. For, in that struggle for
life and death, it would have been madness to trust a hostile or even a
half hearted leader.
Thus far they went along with the revolutionary movement. At this point
they stopped; and, in our judgment, they were right in stopping, as
they had been right in moving. For great ends, and under extraordinary
circumstances, they had concurred in measures which, together with much
good, had necessarily produced much evil; which had unsettled the public
mind; which had taken away from government the sanction of prescription;
which had loosened the very foundations of property and law. They
thought that it was now their duty to prop what it had recently been
their duty to batter. They loved liberty, but liberty associated with
order, with justice, with mercy, and with civilisation. They were
republicans; but they were desirous to adorn their republic with all
that had given grace and dignity to the fallen monarchy. They hoped that
the humanity, the courtesy, the taste, which had done much in old times
to mitigate the slavery of France, would now lend additional charms to
her freedom. They saw with horror crimes exceeding in atrocity those
which had disgraced the infuriated religious factions of the sixteenth
century, perpetrated in the name of reason and philanthropy. They
demanded, with eloquent vehemence, that the authors of the lawless
massacre, which, just before the meeting of the Convention, had
been committed in the prisons of Paris, should be brought to condign
punishment. They treated with just contempt the pleas which have been
set up for that great crime. They admitted that the public danger
was pressing; but they denied that it justified a violation of those
principles of morality on which all society rests. The independence and
honour of France were indeed to be vindicated, but to be vindicated by
triumphs and not by murders.
Opposed to the Girondists was a party which, having been long execrated
throughout the civilised world, has of late--such is the ebb and flow
of opinion--found not only apologists, but even eulogists. We are not
disposed to deny that some members of the Mountain were sincere and
public spirited men. But even the best of them, Carnot, for example, and
Cambon, were far too unscrupulous as to the means which they employed
for the purpose of attaining great ends. In the train of these
enthusiasts followed a crowd, composed of all who, from sensual, sordid,
or malignant motives, wished for a period of boundless license.
When the Convention met, the majority were with the Girondists, and
Barere was with the majority. On the King's trial, indeed, he quitted
the party with which he ordinarily acted, voted with the Mountain, and
spoke against the prisoner with a violence such as few members even of
the Mountain showed.
The conduct of the leading Girondists on that occasion was little
to their honour. Of cruelty, indeed, we fully acquit them; but it is
impossible to acquit them of criminal irresolution and disingenuousness.
They were far, indeed, from thirsting for the blood of Louis: on the
contrary, they were most desirous to protect him. But they were afraid
that, if they went straight forward to their object, the sincerity of
their attachment to republican institutions would be suspected. They
wished to save the King's life, and yet to obtain all the credit of
having been regicides. Accordingly, they traced out for themselves a
crooked course, by which they hoped to attain both their objects. They
first voted the King guilty. They then voted for referring the question
respecting his fate to the whole body of the people. Defeated in this
attempt to rescue him, they reluctantly, and with ill-suppressed shame
and concern, voted for the capital sentence. Then they made a last
attempt in his favour, and voted for respiting the execution. These
zigzag politics produced the effect which any man conversant with public
affairs might have foreseen. The Girondists, instead of attaining both
their ends, failed of both. The Mountain justly charged them with having
attempted to save the King by underhand means. Their own consciences
told them, with equal justice, that their hands had been dipped in the
blood of the most inoffensive and most unfortunate of men. The direct
path was here, as usual, the path not only of honour, but of safety. The
principle on which the Girondists stood as a party was, that the season
for revolutionary violence was over, and that the reign of law and order
ought now to commence. But the proceeding against the King was clearly
revolutionary in its nature. It was not in conformity with the laws.
The only plea for it was, that all ordinary rules of jurisprudence and
morality were suspended by the extreme public danger. This was the very
plea which the Mountain urged in defence of the massacre of September,
and to which, when so urged, the Girondists refused to listen. They
therefore, by voting for the death of the King, conceded to the Mountain
the chief point at issue between the two parties. Had they given a
manful vote against the capital sentence, the regicides would have been
in a minority. It is probable that there would have been an immediate
appeal to force. The Girondists might have been victorious. In the worst
event, they would have fallen with unblemished honour. Thus much
is certain, that their boldness and honesty could not possibly have
produced a worse effect than was actually produced by their timidity and
their stratagems.
Barere, as we have said, sided with the Mountain on this occasion. He
voted against the appeal to the people and against the respite. His
demeanour and his language also were widely different from those of the
Girondists. Their hearts were heavy, and their deportment was that of
men oppressed by sorrow. It was Vergniaud's duty to proclaim the result
of the roll-call. His face was pale, and he trembled with emotion, as in
a low and broken voice he announced that Louis was condemned to death.
Barere had not, it is true, yet attained to full perfection in the art
of mingling jests and conceits with words of death; but he already gave
promise of his future excellence in this high department of Jacobin
oratory. He concluded his speech with a sentence worthy of his head and
heart. "The tree of liberty," he said, "as an ancient author remarks,
flourishes when it is watered with the blood of all classes of tyrants."
M. Hippolyte Carnot has quoted this passage in order, as we suppose, to
do honour to his hero. We wish that a note had been added to inform us
from what ancient author Barere quoted. In the course of our own small
reading among the Greek and Latin writers, we have not happened to fall
in with trees of liberty and watering-pots full of blood; nor can we,
such is our ignorance of classical antiquity, even imagine an Attic or
Roman orator employing imagery of that sort. In plain words, when Barere
talked about an ancient author, he was lying, as he generally was when
he asserted any fact, great or small. Why he lied on this occasion we
cannot guess, unless indeed it was to keep his hand in.
It is not improbable that, but for the one circumstance, Barere would,
like most of those with whom he ordinarily acted, have voted for
the appeal to the people and for the respite. But, just before the
commencement of the trial, papers had been discovered which proved that,
while a member of the National Assembly, he had been in communication
with the Court respecting his Reports on the Woods and Forests. He
was acquitted of all criminality by the Convention; but the fiercer
Republicans considered him as a tool of the fallen monarch; and this
reproach was long repeated in the journal of Marat, and in the speeches
at the Jacobin club. It was natural that a man like Barere should,
under such circumstances, try to distinguish himself among the crowd of
regicides by peculiar ferocity. It was because he had been a royalist
that he was one of the foremost in shedding blood.
The King was no more. The leading Girondists had, by their conduct
towards him, lowered their character in the eyes both of friends and
foes. They still, however, maintained the contest against the Mountain,
called for vengeance on the assassins of September, and protested
against the anarchical and sanguinary doctrines of Marat. For a time
they seemed likely to prevail. As publicists and orators, they had no
rivals in the Convention. They had with them, beyond all doubt, the
great majority both of the deputies and of the French nation. These
advantages, it should seem, ought to have decided the event of the
struggle. But the opposite party had compensating advantages of a
different kind. The chiefs of the Mountain, though not eminently
distinguished by eloquence or knowledge, had great audacity, activity,
and determination. The Convention and France were against them; but the
mob of Paris, the clubs of Paris, and the municipal government of Paris,
were on their side.
The policy of the Jacobins, in this situation, was to subject France
to an aristocracy infinitely worse than that aristocracy which had
emigrated with the count of Artois--to an aristocracy not of birth, not
of wealth, not of education, but of mere locality. They would not hear
of privileged orders; but they wished to have a privileged city. That
twenty-five millions of Frenchmen should be ruled by a hundred thousand
gentlemen and clergymen was insufferable; but that twenty-five millions
of Frenchmen should be ruled by a hundred thousand Parisians was as it
should be. The qualification of a member of the new oligarchy was simply
that he should live near the hall where the Convention met, and should
be able to squeeze himself daily into the gallery during a debate, and
now and then to attend with a pike for the purpose of blockading the
doors. It was quite agreeable to the maxims of the Mountain that a
score of draymen from Santerre's brewery, or of devils from Hebert's
printing-house, should be permitted to drown the voices of men
commissioned to speak the sense of such cities as Marseilles, Bordeaux,
and Lyons; and that a rabble of half-naked porters from the Faubourg St
Antoine should have power to annul decrees for which the representatives
of fifty or sixty departments had voted. It was necessary to find some
pretext for so odious and absurd a tyranny. Such a pretext was found.
To the old phrases of liberty and equality were added the sonorous
watchwords, unity and indivisability. A new crime was invented, and
called by the name of federalism. The object of the Girondists, it
was asserted, was to break up the great nation into little independent
commonwealths, bound together only by a league like that which connects
the Swiss Cantons or the United States of America. The great obstacle
in the way of this pernicious design was the influence of Paris. To
strengthen the influence of Paris ought therefore to be the chief object
of every patriot.
The accusation brought against the leaders of the Girondist party was a
mere calumny. They were undoubtedly desirous to prevent the capital from
domineering over the republic, and would gladly have seen the Convention
removed for a time to some provincial town, or placed under the
protection of a trusty guard, which might have overawed the Parisian
mob; but there is not the slightest reason to suspect them of any
design against the unity of the state. Barere, however, really was a
federalist, and, we are inclined to believe, the only federalist in the
Convention. As far as a man so unstable and servile can be said to have
felt any preference for any form of government, he felt a preference for
federal government. He was born under the Pyrenees; he was a Gascon of
the Gascons, one of a people strongly distinguished by intellectual
and moral character, by manners, by modes of speech, by accent, and by
physiognomy, from the French of the Seine and of the Loire; and he had
many of the peculiarities of the race to which he belonged. When he
first left his own province he had attained his thirty-fourth year, and
had acquired a high local reputation for eloquence and literature. He
had then visited Paris for the first time. He had found himself in a new
world. His feelings were those of a banished man. It is clear also that
he had been by no means without his share of the small disappointments
and humiliations so often experienced by men of letters who, elated
by provincial applause, venture to display their powers before the
fastidious critics of a capital. On the other hand, whenever he
revisited the mountains among which he had been born, he found
himself an object of general admiration. His dislike of Paris, and his
partiality to his native district, were therefore as strong and durable
as any sentiments of a mind like his could be. He long continued to
maintain that the ascendency of one great city was the bane of France;
that the superiority of taste and intelligence which it was the fashion
to ascribe to the inhabitants of that city were wholly imaginary; and
that the nation would never enjoy a really good government till the
Alsatian people, the Breton people, the people of Bearn, the people of
Provence, should have each an independent existence, and laws suited to
its own tastes and habits. These communities he proposed to unite by
a tie similar to that which binds together the grave Puritans of
Connecticut and the dissolute slave-drivers of New Orleans. To Paris
he was unwilling to grant even the rank which Washington holds in the
United States. He thought it desirable that the congress of the French
federation should have no fixed place of meeting, but should sit
sometimes at Rouen, sometimes at Bordeaux, sometimes at his own
Toulouse.
Animated by such feelings, he was, till the close of May 1793, a
Girondist, if not an ultra-Girondist. He exclaimed against those impure
and bloodthirsty men who wished to make the public danger a pretext for
cruelty and rapine. "Peril," he said, "could be no excuse for crime. It
is when the wind blows hard, and the waves run high, that the anchor is
most needed; it is when a revolution is raging, that the great laws of
morality are most necessary to the safety of a state." Of Marat he spoke
with abhorrence and contempt; of the municipal authorities of Paris with
just severity. He loudly complained that there were Frenchmen who paid
to the Mountain that homage which was due to the Convention alone. When
the establishment of the Revolutionary Tribunal was first proposed, he
joined himself to Vergniaud and Buzot, who strongly objected to that
odious measure. "It cannot be," exclaimed Barere, "that men really
attached to liberty will imitate the most frightful excesses of
despotism!" He proved to the Convention, after his fashion, out of
Sallust, that such arbitrary courts may indeed, for a time, be severe
only on real criminals, but must inevitably degenerate into instruments
of private cupidity and revenge. When, on the tenth of March, the worst
part of the population of Paris made the first unsuccessful attempt to
destroy the Girondists, Barere eagerly called for vigorous measures of
repression and punishment. On the second of April, another attempt of
the Jacobins of Paris to usurp supreme dominion over the republic was
brought to the knowledge of the Convention; and again Barere spoke with
warmth against the new tyranny which afflicted France, and declared that
the people of the departments would never crouch beneath the tyranny of
one ambitious city. He even proposed a resolution to the effect that the
Convention would exert against the demagogues of the capital the same
energy which had been exerted against the tyrant Louis. We are assured
that, in private as in public, he at this time uniformly spoke with
strong aversion of the Mountain.
His apparent zeal for the cause of humanity and order had its reward.
Early in April came the tidings of Dumourier's defection. This was a
heavy blow to the Girondists. Dumourier was their general. His victories
had thrown a lustre on the whole party; his army, it had been hoped,
would, in the worst event, protect the deputies of the nation against
the ragged pikemen of the garrets of Paris. He was now a deserter and
an exile; and those who had lately placed their chief reliance on
his support were compelled to join with their deadliest enemies in
execrating his treason. At this perilous conjuncture, it was resolved
to appoint a Committee of Public Safety, and to arm that committee with
powers, small indeed when compared with those which it afterwards drew
to itself, but still great and formidable. The moderate party, regarding
Barere as a representative of their feelings and opinions, elected him
a member. In his new situation he soon began to make himself useful. He
brought to the deliberations of the Committee, not indeed the knowledge
or the ability of a great statesman, but a tongue and a pen which, if
others would only supply ideas, never paused for want of words. His mind
was a mere organ of communication between other minds. It originated
nothing; it retained nothing; but it transmitted everything. The
post assigned to him by his colleagues was not really of the highest
importance; but it was prominent, and drew the attention of all Europe.
When a great measure was to be brought forward, when an account was to
be rendered of an important event, he was generally the mouthpiece of
the administration. He was therefore not unnaturally considered, by
persons who lived at a distance from the seat of government, and above
all by foreigners, who, while the war raged, knew France only from
journals, as the head of that administration of which, in truth, he
was only the secretary and the spokesman. The author of the History of
Europe, in our own Annual Registers, appears to have been completely
under this delusion.
The conflict between the hostile parties was meanwhile fast approaching
to a crisis. The temper of Paris grew daily fiercer and fiercer.
Delegates appointed by thirty-five of the forty-eight wards of the city
appeared at the bar of the Convention, and demanded that Vergniaud,
Brissot, Guadet, Gensonne, Barbaroux, Buzot, Petion, Louvet, and many
other deputies, should be expelled. This demand was disapproved by at
least three-fourths of the Assembly, and, when known in the departments,
called forth a general cry of indignation. Bordeaux declared that it
would stand by its representatives, and would, if necessary, defend them
by the sword against the tyranny of Paris. Lyons and Marseilles were
animated by a similar spirit. These manifestations of public opinion
gave courage to the majority of the Convention. Thanks were voted to
the people of Bordeaux for their patriotic declaration; and a
commission consisting of twelve members was appointed for the purpose of
investigating the conduct of the municipal authorities of Paris, and was
empowered to place under arrest such persons as should appear to have
been concerned in any plot against the authority of the Convention. This
measure was adopted on the motion of Barere.
A few days of stormy excitement and profound anxiety followed; and then
came the crash. On the thirty-first of May the mob of Paris rose; the
palace of the Tuileries was besieged by a vast array of pikes; the
majority of the deputies, after vain struggles and remonstrances,
yielded to violence, and suffered the Mountain to carry a decree for the
suspension and arrest of the deputies whom the wards of the capital had
accused.
During this contest, Barere had been tossed backwards and forwards
between the two raging factions. His feelings, languid and unsteady as
they always were, drew him to the Girondists; but he was awed by the
vigour and determination of the Mountain. At one moment he held high
and firm language, complained that the Convention was not free, and
protested against the validity of any vote passed under coercion. At
another moment he proposed to conciliate the Parisians by abolishing
that commission of twelve which he had himself proposed only a few days
before; and himself drew up a paper condemning the very measures which
had been adopted at his own instance, and eulogising the public spirit
of the insurgents. To do him justice, it was not without some symptoms
of shame that he read his document from the tribune, where he had so
often expressed very different sentiments. It is said that, at some
passages, he was even seen to blush. It may have been so; he was still
in his novitiate of infamy.
Some days later he proposed that hostages for the personal safety of the
accused deputies should be sent to the departments, and offered to be
himself one of those hostages. Nor do we in the least doubt that the
offer was sincere. He would, we firmly believe, have thought himself far
safer at Bordeaux or Marseilles than at Paris. His proposition, however,
was not carried into effect; and he remained in the power of the
victorious Mountain.
This was the great crisis of his life. Hitherto he had done nothing
inexpiable, nothing which marked him out as a much worse man than most
of his colleagues in the Convention. His voice had generally been on
the side of moderate measures. Had he bravely cast in his lot with the
Girondists, and suffered with them, he would, like them, have had a not
dishonourable place in history. Had he, like the great body of deputies
who meant well, but who had not the courage to expose themselves
to martyrdom, crouched quietly under the dominion of the triumphant
minority, and suffered every motion of Robespierre and Billaud to
pass unopposed, he would have incurred no peculiar ignominy. But it is
probable that this course was not open to him. He had been too prominent
among the adversaries of the Mountain to be admitted to quarter without
making some atonement. It was necessary that, if he hoped to find pardon
from his new lords, he should not be merely a silent and passive
slave. What passed in private between him and them cannot be accurately
related; but the result was soon apparent. The Committee of Public
Safety was renewed. Several of the fiercest of the dominant faction,
Couthon for example, and Saint Just, were substituted for more moderate
politicians; but Barere was suffered to retain his seat at the Board.
The indulgence with which he was treated excited the murmurs of some
stern and ardent zealots. Marat, in the very last words that he wrote,
words not published till the dagger of Charlotte Corday had avenged
France and mankind, complained that a man who had no principles, who was
always on the side of the strongest, who had been a royalist, and who
was ready, in case of a turn of fortune, to be a royalist again, should
be entrusted with an important share in the administration. (See the
"Publiciste" of the 14th July, 1793. Marat was stabbed on the evening
of the 13th.) But the chiefs of the Mountain judged more correctly. They
knew, indeed, as well as Marat, that Barere was a man utterly without
faith or steadiness; that, if he could be said to have any political
leaning, his leaning was not towards them; that he felt for the
Girondist party that faint and wavering sort of preference of which
alone his nature was susceptible; and that, if he had been at liberty
to make his choice, he would rather have murdered Robespierre and Danton
than Vergniaud and Gensonne. But they justly appreciated that levity
which made him incapable alike of earnest love and of earnest hatred,
and that meanness which made it necessary to him to have a master. In
truth, what the planters of Carolina and Louisiana say of black men with
flat noses and woolly hair was strictly true of Barere. The curse of
Canaan was upon him. He was born a slave. Baseness was an instinct in
him. The impulse which drove him from a party in adversity to a party in
prosperity was as irresistible as that which drives the cuckoo and the
swallow towards the sun when the dark and cold months are approaching.
The law which doomed him to be the humble attendant of stronger spirits
resembled the law which binds the pilot fish to the shark. "Ken ye,"
said a shrewd Scotch lord, who was asked his opinion of James the
First--"Ken ye a John Ape? If I have Jacko by the collar, I can make him
bite you; but, if you have Jacko, you can make him bite me." Just such
a creature was Barere. In the hands of the Girondists he would have been
eager to proscribe the Jacobins; he was just as ready, in the gripe of
the Jacobins, to proscribe the Girondists. On the fidelity of such a man
the heads of the Mountain could not, of course, reckon; but they
valued their conquest as the very easy and not very delicate lover
in Congreve's lively song valued the conquest of a prostitute of a
different kind. Barere was, like Chloe, false and common; but he was,
like Chloe, constant while possessed; and they asked no more. They
needed a service which he was perfectly competent to perform. Destitute
as he was of all the talents both of an active and of a speculative
statesman, he could with great facility draw up a report, or make a
speech on any subject and on any side. If other people would furnish
facts and thoughts, he could always furnish phrases; and this talent was
absolutely at the command of his owners for the time being. Nor had
he excited any angry passion among those to whom he had hitherto been
opposed. They felt no more hatred to him than they felt to the horses
which dragged the cannon of the Duke of Brunswick and of the Prince
of Saxe-Coburg. The horses had only done according to their kind, and
would, if they fell into the hands of the French, drag with equal vigour
and equal docility the guns of the republic, and therefore ought not
merely to be spared, but to be well fed and curried. So was it with
Barere. He was of a nature so low, that it might be doubted whether he
could properly be an object of the hostility of reasonable beings.
He had not been an enemy; he was not now a friend. But he had been an
annoyance; and he would now be a help.
But, though the heads of the Mountain pardoned this man, and admitted
him into partnership with themselves, it was not without exacting
pledges such as made it impossible for him, false and fickle as he was,
ever again to find admission into the ranks which he had deserted. That
was truly a terrible sacrament by which they admitted the apostate into
their communion. They demanded of him that he should himself take the
most prominent part in murdering his old friends. To refuse was as much
as his life was worth. But what is life worth when it is only one long
agony of remorse and shame? These, however, are feelings of which it
is idle to talk, when we are considering the conduct of such a man
as Barere. He undertook the task, mounted the tribune, and told the
Convention that the time was come for taking the stern attitude of
justice, and for striking at all conspirators without distinction. He
then moved that Buzot, Barbaroux, Petion, and thirteen other deputies,
should be placed out of the pale of the law, or, in other words,
beheaded without a trial; and that Vergniaud, Guadet, Gensonne, and six
others, should be impeached. The motion was carried without debate.
We have already seen with what effrontery Barere has denied, in these
Memoirs, that he took any part against the Girondists. This denial, we
think, was the only thing wanting to make his infamy complete. The most
impudent of all lies was a fit companion for the foulest of all murders.
Barere, however, had not yet earned his pardon. The Jacobin party
contained one gang which, even in that party, was pre-eminent in every
mean and every savage vice; a gang so low-minded and so inhuman
that, compared with them, Robespierre might be called magnanimous and
merciful. Of these wretches Hebert was perhaps the best representative.
His favourite amusement was to torment and insult the miserable remains
of that great family which, having ruled France during eight hundred
years, had now become an object of pity to the humblest artisan or
peasant. The influence of this man, and of men like him, induced the
Committee of Public Safety to determine that Marie Antoinette should be
sent to the scaffold. Barere was again summoned to his duty. Only four
days after he had proposed the decrees against the Girondist deputies
he again mounted the tribune, in order to move that the Queen should be
brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal. He was improving fast in the
society of his new allies. When he asked for the heads of Vergniaud and
Petion he had spoken like a man who had some slight sense of his own
guilt and degradation: he had said little; and that little had not been
violent. The office of expatiating on the guilt of his old friends he
had left to Saint Just. Very different was Barere's second appearance
in the character of an accuser. He now cried out for blood in the eager
tones of the true and burning thirst, and raved against the Austrian
woman with the virulence natural to a coward who finds himself at
liberty to outrage that which he has feared and envied. We have already
exposed the shameless mendacity with which, in these Memoirs, he
attempts to throw the blame of his own guilt on the guiltless.
On the day on which the fallen Queen was dragged, already more than half
dead, to her doom, Barere regaled Robespierre and some other Jacobins
at a tavern. Robespierre's acceptance of the invitation caused some
surprise to those who knew how long and how bitterly it was his nature
to hate. "Robespierre of the party!" muttered Saint Just. "Barere is
the only man whom Robespierre has forgiven." We have an account of
this singular repast from one of the guests. Robespierre condemned the
senseless brutality with which Hebert had conducted the proceedings
against the Austrian woman, and, in talking on that subject, became
so much excited that he broke his plate in the violence of his
gesticulation. Barere exclaimed that the guillotine had cut a diplomatic
knot which it might have been difficult to untie. In the intervals
between the Beaune and the Champagne, between the ragout of thrushes
and the partridge with truffles, he fervently preached his new political
creed. "The vessel of the revolution," he said, "can float into port
only on waves of blood. We must begin with the members of the National
Assembly and of the Legislative Assembly. That rubbish must be swept
away."
As he talked at table he talked in the Convention. His peculiar style
of oratory was now formed. It was not altogether without ingenuity and
liveliness. But in any other age or country it would have been thought
unfit for the deliberations of a grave assembly, and still more
unfit for state papers. It might, perhaps, succeed at a meeting of a
Protestant Association in Exeter Hall, at a Repeal dinner in Ireland,
after men had well drunk, or in an American oration on the fourth of
July. No legislative body would now endure it. But in France, during
the reign of the Convention, the old laws of composition were held in as
much contempt as the old government or the old creed. Correct and noble
diction belonged, like the etiquette of Versailles and the solemnities
of Notre Dame, to an age which had passed away. Just as a swarm of
ephemeral constitutions, democratic, directorial, and consular,
sprang from the decay of the ancient monarchy; just as a swarm of new
superstitions, the worship of the Goddess of Reason, and the fooleries
of the Theo-philanthropists, sprang from the decay of the ancient
Church; even so, out of the decay of the ancient French eloquence sprang
new fashions of eloquence, for the understanding of which new grammars
and dictionaries were necessary. The same innovating spirit which
altered the common phrases of salutation, which turned hundreds of Johns
and Peters into Scaevolas and Aristogitons, and which expelled Sunday
and Monday, January and February, Lady-day and Christmas, from the
calendar, in order to substitute Decadi and Primidi, Nivose and
Pluviose, Feasts of Opinion and Feasts of the Supreme Being, changed all
the forms of official correspondence. For the calm, guarded, and sternly
courteous language which governments had long been accustomed to employ,
were substituted puns, interjections, Ossianic rants, rhetoric worthy
only of a schoolboy, scurrility worthy only of a fishwife. Of the
phraseology which was now thought to be peculiarly well suited to a
report or a manifesto Barere had a greater command than any man of his
time, and, during the short and sharp paroxysm of the revolutionary
delirium, passed for a great orator. When the fit was over, he was
considered as what he really was, a man of quick apprehension and fluent
elocution, with no originality, with little information, and with
a taste as bad as his heart. His Reports were popularly called
Carmagnoles. A few months ago we should have had some difficulty in
conveying to an English reader an exact notion of the state papers to
which this appellation was given. Fortunately a noble and distinguished
person, whom her Majesty's Ministers have thought qualified to fill the
most important post in the empire, has made our task easy. Whoever has
read Lord Ellenborough's proclamations is able to form a complete idea
of a Carmagnole.
The effect which Barere's discourses at one time produced is not to be
wholly attributed to the perversion of the national taste. The occasions
on which he rose were frequently such as would have secured to the
worst speaker a favourable hearing. When any military advantage had been
gained, he was generally deputed by the Committee of Public Safety to
announce the good news. The hall resounded with applause as he mounted
the tribune, holding the despatches in his hand. Deputies and strangers
listened with delight while he told them that victory was the order
of the day; that the guineas of Pitt had been vainly lavished to hire
machines six feet high, carrying guns; that the flight of the English
leopard deserved to be celebrated by Tyrtaeus; and that the saltpetre
dug out of the cellars of Paris had been turned into thunder, which
would crush the Titan brethren, George and Francis.
Meanwhile the trial of the accused Girondists, who were under arrest in
Paris, came on. They flattered themselves with a vain hope of escape.
They placed some reliance on their innocence, and some reliance on their
eloquence. They thought that shame would suffice to restrain any
man, however violent and cruel, from publicly committing the flagrant
iniquity of condemning them to death. The Revolutionary Tribunal was new
to its functions. No member of the Convention had yet been executed;
and it was probable that the boldest Jacobin would shrink from being
the first to violate the sanctity which was supposed to belong to the
representatives of the people.
The proceedings lasted some days. Gensonne and Brissot defended
themselves with great ability and presence of mind against the vile
Hebert and Chaumette, who appeared as accusers. The eloquent voice of
Vergniaud was heard for the last time. He pleaded his own cause and that
of his friends, with such force of reason and elevation of sentiment
that a murmur of pity and admiration rose from the audience. Nay, the
court itself, not yet accustomed to riot in daily carnage, showed signs
of emotion. The sitting was adjourned; and a rumour went forth that
there would be an acquittal. The Jacobins met, breathing vengeance.
Robespierre undertook to be their organ. He rose on the following day in
the Convention, and proposed a decree of such atrocity that even among
the acts of that year it can hardly be paralleled. By this decree the
tribunal was empowered to cut short the defence of the prisoners, to
pronounce the case clear, and to pass immediate judgment. One deputy
made a faint opposition. Barere instantly sprang up to support
Robespierre--Barere, the federalist; Barere, the author of that
Commission of Twelve which was among the chief causes of the hatred
borne by Paris to the Girondists; Barere, who in these Memoirs denies
that he ever took any part against the Girondists; Barere, who has the
effrontery to declare that he greatly loved and esteemed Vergniaud. The
decree was passed; and the tribunal, without suffering the prisoners to
conclude what they had to say, pronounced them guilty.
The following day was the saddest in the sad history of the Revolution.
The sufferers were so innocent, so brave, so eloquent, so accomplished,
so young. Some of them were graceful and handsome youths of six or seven
and twenty. Vergniaud and Gensonne were little more than thirty. They
had been only a few months engaged in public affairs. In a few months
the fame of their genius had filled Europe; and they were to die for
no crime but this, that they had wished to combine order, justice, and
mercy with freedom. Their great fault was want of courage. We mean want
of political courage--of that courage which is proof to clamour and
obloquy, and which meets great emergencies by daring and decisive
measures. Alas! they had but too good an opportunity of proving that
they did not want courage to endure with manly cheerfulness the worst
that could be inflicted by such tyrants as Saint Just, and such slaves
as Barere.
They were not the only victims of the noble cause. Madame Roland
followed them to the scaffold with a spirit as heroic as their own. Her
husband was in a safe hiding-place, but could not bear to survive her.
His body was found on the high road near Rouen. He had fallen on his
sword. Condorcet swallowed opium. At Bordeaux the steel fell on the
necks of the bold and quick-witted Guadet and of Barbaroux, the chief
of those enthusiasts from the Rhone whose valour, in the great crisis of
the tenth of August, had turned back the tide of battle from the Louvre
to the Tuileries. In a field near the Garonne was found all that the
wolves had left of Petion, once honoured, greatly indeed beyond his
deserts, as the model of republican virtue. We are far from regarding
even the best of the Girondists with unmixed admiration; but history
owes to them this honourable testimony, that, being free to choose
whether they would be oppressors or victims, they deliberately and
firmly resolved rather to suffer injustice than to inflict it.
And now began that strange period known by the name of the Reign of
Terror. The Jacobins had prevailed. This was their hour, and the power
of darkness. The Convention was subjugated and reduced to profound
silence on the highest questions of state. The sovereignty passed to the
Committee of Public Safety. To the edicts framed by that Committee the
representative assembly did not venture to offer even the species of
opposition which the ancient parliament had frequently offered to the
mandates of the ancient kings. Six persons held the chief power in the
small cabinet which now domineered over France--Robespierre, Saint Just,
Couthon, Collot, Billaud, and Barere.
To some of these men, and of those who adhered to them, it is due to say
that the fanaticism which had emancipated them from the restraints of
justice and compassion had emancipated them also from the dominion of
vulgar cupidity and of vulgar fear; that, while hardly knowing where to
find an assignat of a few francs to pay for a dinner, they expended with
strict integrity the immense revenue which they collected by every art
of rapine; and that they were ready, in support of their cause, to mount
the scaffold with as much indifference as they showed when they signed
the death-warrants of aristocrats and priests. But no great party can be
composed of such materials as these. It is the inevitable law that such
zealots as we have described shall collect around them a multitude
of slaves, of cowards, and of libertines, whose savage tempers and
licentious appetites, withheld only by the dread of law and magistracy
from the worst excesses, are called into full activity by the hope of
immunity. A faction which, from whatever motive, relaxes the great laws
of morality is certain to be joined by the most immoral part of the
community. This has been repeatedly proved in religious wars. The war
of the Holy Sepulchre, the Albigensian war, the Huguenot war, the
Thirty Years' war, all originated in pious zeal. That zeal inflamed
the champions of the Church to such a point that they regarded all
generosity to the vanquished as a sinful weakness. The infidel, the
heretic, was to be run down like a mad dog. No outrage committed by the
Catholic warrior on the miscreant enemy could deserve punishment. As
soon as it was known that boundless license was thus given to barbarity
and dissoluteness, thousands of wretches who cared nothing for the
sacred cause, but who were eager to be exempted from the police of
peaceful cities, and the discipline of well-governed camps, flocked
to the standard of the faith. The men who had set up that statute were
sincere, chaste, regardless of lucre, and perhaps, where only themselves
were concerned, not unforgiving; but round that standard were assembled
such gangs of rogues, ravishers, plunderers, and ferocious bravoes, as
were scarcely ever found under the flag of any state engaged in a mere
temporal quarrel. In a very similar way was the Jacobin party composed.
There was a small nucleus of enthusiasts; round that nucleus was
gathered a vast mass of ignoble depravity; and in all that mass there
was nothing so depraved and so ignoble as Barere.
Then came those days when the most barbarous of all codes was
administered by the most barbarous of all tribunals; when no man could
greet his neighbours, or say his prayers, or dress his hair, without
danger of committing a capital crime; when spies lurked in every corner;
when the guillotine was long and hard at work every morning; when the
jails were filled as close as the hold of a slave-ship; when the
gutters ran foaming with blood into the Seine; when it was death to
be great-niece of a captain of the royal guards, or half-brother of a
doctor of the Sorbonne, to express a doubt whether assignats would not
fall, to hint that the English had been victorious in the action of the
first of June, to have a copy of one of Burke's pamphlets locked up in a
desk, to laugh at a Jacobin for taking the name of Cassius or Timoleon,
or to call the Fifth Sansculottide by its old superstitious name of St
Matthew's Day. While the daily waggon-loads of victims were carried
to their doom through the streets of Paris, the Proconsuls whom the
sovereign Committee had sent forth to the departments revelled in an
extravagance of cruelty unknown even in the capital. The knife of the
deadly machine rose and fell too slow for their work of slaughter. Long
rows of captives were mowed down with grapeshot. Holes were made in the
bottom of crowded barges. Lyons was turned into a desert. At Arras even
the cruel mercy of a speedy death was denied to the prisoners. All
down the Loire, from Saumur to the sea, great flocks of crows and kites
feasted on naked corpses, twined together in hideous embraces. No
mercy was shown to sex or age. The number of young lads and of girls
of seventeen who were murdered by that execrable government is to be
reckoned by hundreds. Babies torn from the breast were tossed from pike
to pike along the Jacobin ranks. One champion of liberty had his pockets
well stuffed with ears. Another swaggered about with the finger of a
little child in his hat. A few months had sufficed to degrade France
below the level of New Zealand.
It is absurd to say that any amount of public danger can justify a
system like this, we do not say on Christian principles, we do not
say on the principles of a high morality, but even on principles
of Machiavellian policy. It is true that great emergencies call for
activity and vigilance; it is true that they justify severity which, in
ordinary times, would deserve the name of cruelty. But indiscriminate
severity can never, under any circumstances, be useful. It is plain
that the whole efficacy of punishment depends on the care with which the
guilty are distinguished. Punishment which strikes the guilty and the
innocent promiscuously, operates merely like a pestilence or a great
convulsion of nature, and has no more tendency to prevent offences
than the cholera, or an earthquake like that of Lisbon, would have. The
energy for which the Jacobin administration is praised was merely the
energy of the Malay who maddens himself with opium, draws his knife, and
runs amuck through the streets, slashing right and left at friends
and foes. Such has never been the energy of truly great rulers; of
Elizabeth, for example, of Oliver, or of Frederick. They were not,
indeed, scrupulous. But, had they been less scrupulous than they were,
the strength and amplitude of their minds would have preserved them
from crimes such as those which the small men of the Committee of Public
Safety took for daring strokes of policy. The great Queen who so long
held her own against foreign and domestic enemies, against temporal and
spiritual arms; the great Protector who governed with more than regal
power, in despite both of royalists and republicans; the great King
who, with a beaten army and an exhausted treasury, defended his little
dominions to the last against the united efforts of Russia, Austria, and
France; with what scorn would they have heard that it was impossible for
them to strike a salutary terror into the disaffected without sending
school-boys and school-girls to death by cart-loads and boat-loads!
The popular notion is, we believe, that the leading Terrorists were
wicked men, but, at the same time, great men. We can see nothing great
about them but their wickedness. That their policy was daringly original
is a vulgar error. Their policy is as old as the oldest accounts which
we have of human misgovernment. It seemed new in France and in the
eighteenth century only because it had been long disused, for excellent
reasons, by the enlightened part of mankind. But it has always
prevailed, and still prevails, in savage and half-savage nations, and is
the chief cause which prevents such nations from making advances towards
civilisation. Thousands of deys, of beys, of pachas, of rajahs, of
nabobs, have shown themselves as great masters of statecraft as the
members of the Committee of Public Safety. Djezzar, we imagine, was
superior to any of them in their new line. In fact, there is not a petty
tyrant in Asia or Africa so dull or so unlearned as not to be fully
qualified for the business of Jacobin police and Jacobin finance.
To behead people by scores without caring whether they are guilty or
innocent; to wring money out of the rich by the help of jailers and
executioners; to rob the public creditor, and to put him to death if
he remonstrates; to take loaves by force out of the bakers' shops; to
clothe and mount soldiers by seizing on one man's wool and linen, and on
another man's horses and saddles, without compensation; is of all
modes of governing the simplest and most obvious. Of its morality we at
present say nothing. But surely it requires no capacity beyond that of
a barbarian or a child. By means like those which we have described, the
Committee of Public Safety undoubtedly succeeded, for a short time, in
enforcing profound submission, and in raising immense funds. But to en
force submission by butchery, and to raise funds by spoliation, is not
statesmanship. The real statesman is he who, in troubled times, keeps
down the turbulent without unnecessarily harrassing the well-affected;
and who, when great pecuniary resources are needed, provides for the
public exigencies without violating the security of property and drying
up the sources of future prosperity. Such a statesman, we are confident,
might, in 1793, have preserved the independence of France without
shedding a drop of innocent blood, without plundering a single
warehouse. Unhappily, the Republic was subject to men who were mere
demagogues and in no sense statesmen. They could declaim at a club. They
could lead a rabble to mischief. But they had no skill to conduct the
affairs of an empire. The want of skill they supplied for a time by
atrocity and blind violence. For legislative ability, fiscal ability,
military ability, diplomatic ability, they had one substitute, the
guillotine. Indeed their exceeding ignorance, and the barrenness of
their invention, are the best excuse for their murders and robberies. We
really believe that they would not have cut so many throats, and picked
so many pockets, if they had known how to govern in any other way.
That under their administration the war against the European Coalition
was successfully conducted is true. But that war had been successfully
conducted before their elevation, and continued to be successfully
conducted after their fall. Terror was not the order of the day when
Brussels opened its gates to Dumourier. Terror had ceased to be the
order of the day when Piedmont and Lombardy were conquered by Bonaparte.
The truth is, that France was saved, not by the Committee of Public
Safety, but by the energy, patriotism, and valour of the French people.
Those high qualities were victorious in spite of the incapacity of
rulers whose administration was a tissue, not merely of crimes, but of
blunders.
We have not time to tell how the leaders of the savage faction at length
began to avenge mankind on each other: how the craven Hebert was dragged
wailing and trembling to his doom; how the nobler Danton, moved by a
late repentance, strove in vain to repair the evil which he had wrought,
and half redeemed the great crime of September by man fully encountering
death in the cause of mercy.