Our business is with Barere. In all those things he was not only

consenting, but eagerly and joyously forward. Not merely was he one

of the guilty administration. He was the man to whom was especially

assigned the office of proposing and defending outrages on justice and

humanity, and of furnishing to atrocious schemes an appropriate garb of

atrocious rodomontade. Barere first proclaimed from the tribune of the

Convention that terror must be the order of the day. It was by Barere

that the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris was provided with the aid of a

public accuser worthy of such a court, the infamous Fouquier Tinville.

It was Barere who, when one of the old members of the National Assembly

had been absolved by the Revolutionary Tribunal, gave orders that a

fresh jury should be summoned. "Acquit one of the National Assembly!"

he cried. "The Tribunal is turning against the Revolution." It is

unnecessary to say that the prisoner's head was soon in the basket. It

was Barere who moved that the city of Lyons should be destroyed. "Let

the plough," he cried from the tribune, "pass over her. Let her name

cease to exist. The rebels are conquered; but are they all exterminated?

No weakness. No mercy. Let every one be smitten. Two words will suffice

to tell the whole. Lyons made war on liberty; Lyons is no more."

When Toulon was taken Barere came forward to announce the event. "The

conquest," said the apostate Brissotine, "won by the Mountain over the

Brissotines must be commemorated by a mark set on the place where Toulon

once stood." The national thunder must crush the house of every trader

in the town. When Camille Desmoulins, long distinguished among the

republicans by zeal and ability, dared to raise his eloquent voice

against the Reign of Terror, and to point out the close analogy between

the government which then oppressed France and the government of the

worst of the Caesars, Barere rose to complain of the weak compassion

which tried to revive the hopes of the aristocracy. "Whoever," he said,

"is nobly born is a man to be suspected. Every priest, every frequenter

of the old court, every lawyer, every banker, is a man to be suspected.

Every person who grumbles at the course which the Revolution takes is a

man to be suspected. There are whole castes already tried and condemned.

There are callings which carry their doom with them. There are relations

of blood which the law regards with an evil eye. Republicans of

France!" yelled the renegade Girondist, the old enemy of the

Mountain--"Republicans of France! the Brissotines led you by gentle

means to slavery. The Mountain leads you by strong measures to freedom.

Oh! who can count the evils which a false compassion may produce?"

When the friends of Danton mustered courage to express a wish that the

Convention would at least hear him in his own defence before it sent him

to certain death, the voice of Barere was the loudest in opposition to

their prayer. When the crimes of Lebon, one of the worst, if not the

very worst, of the viceregents of the Committee of Public Safety, had so

maddened the people of the Department of the North that they resorted to

the desperate expedient of imploring the protection of the Convention,

Barere pleaded the cause of the accused tyrant, and threatened the

petitioners with the utmost vengeance of the government. "These

charges," he said, "have been suggested by wily aristocrats. The man who

crushes the enemies of the people, though he may be hurried by his

zeal into some excesses, can never be a proper object of censure. The

proceedings of Lebon may have been a little harsh as to form." One of

the small irregularities thus gently censured was this: Lebon kept a

wretched man a quarter of an hour under the knife of the guillotine,

in order to torment him, by reading to him, before he was despatched,

a letter, the contents of which were supposed to be such as would

aggravate even the bitterness of death. "But what," proceeded Barere,

"is not permitted to the hatred of a republican against aristocracy? How

many generous sentiments atone for what may perhaps seem acrimonious in

the prosecution of public enemies? Revolutionary measures are always

to be spoken of with respect. Liberty is a virgin whose veil it is not

lawful to lift."

After this, it would be idle to dwell on facts which would indeed,

of themselves, suffice to render a name infamous, but which make no

perceptible addition to the great infamy of Barere. It would be idle,

for example, to relate how he, a man of letters, a member of an Academy

of Inscriptions, was foremost in that war against learning, art, and

history which disgraced the Jacobin government; how he recommended a

general conflagration of libraries; how he proclaimed that all records

of events anterior to the Revolution ought to be destroyed; how he laid

waste the Abbey of St Denis, pulled down monuments consecrated by the

veneration of ages, and scattered on the wind the dust of ancient kings.

He was, in truth, seldom so well employed as when he turned for a moment

from making war on the living to make war on the dead.

Equally idle would it be to dilate on his sensual excesses. That in

Barere as in the whole breed of Neros, Caligulas, and Domitians whom he

resembled, voluptuousness was mingled with cruelty; that he withdrew,

twice in every decade, from the work of blood, to the smiling gardens of

Clichy, and there forgot public cares in the madness of wine and in the

arms of courtesans, has often been repeated. M. Hippolyte Carnot does

not altogether deny the truth of these stories, but justly observes that

Barere's dissipation was not carried to such a point as to interfere

with his industry. Nothing can be more true. Barere was by no means so

much addicted to debauchery as to neglect the work of murder. It was his

boast that, even during his hours of recreation, he cut out work for the

Revolutionary Tribunal. To those who expressed a fear that his exertions

would hurt his health, he gaily answered that he was less busy than they

thought. "The guillotine," he said, "does all; the guillotine governs."

For ourselves, we are much more disposed to look indulgently on

the pleasures which he allowed to himself than on the pain which he

inflicted on his neighbours.

"Atque utinam his potius nugis tota illa dedisset

Tempora saevitiae, claras quibus abstulit urbi

Illustresque animas, impune ac vindice nullo."

An immoderate appetite for sensual gratifications is undoubtedly a

blemish on the fame of Henry the Fourth, of Lord Somers, of Mr Fox. But

the vices of honest men are the virtues of Barere.

And now Barere had become a really cruel man. It was from mere

pusillanimity that he had perpetrated his first great crimes. But the

whole history of our race proves that the taste for the misery of others

is a taste which minds not naturally ferocious may too easily acquire,

and which, when once acquired, is as strong as any of the propensities

with which we are born. A very few months had sufficed to bring this man

into a state of mind in which images of despair, wailing, and death had

an exhilarating effect on him, and inspired him as wine and love inspire

men of free and joyous natures. The cart creaking under its daily

freight of victims, ancient men and lads, and fair young girls, the

binding of the hands, the thrusting of the head out of the little

national sash-window, the crash of the axe, the pool of blood beneath

the scaffold, the heads rolling by scores in the panier--these things

were to him what Lalage and a cask of Falernian were to Horace, what

Rosette and a bottle of iced champagne are to De Beranger. As soon as

he began to speak of slaughter his heart seemed to be enlarged, and

his fancy to become unusually fertile of conceits and gasconades.

Robespierre, Saint Just, and Billaud, whose barbarity was the effect of

earnest and gloomy hatred, were, in his view, men who made a toil of a

pleasure. Cruelty was no such melancholy business, to be gone about

with an austere brow and a whining tone; it was a recreation, fitly

accompanied by singing and laughing. In truth, Robespierre and Barere

might be well compared to the two renowned hangmen of Louis the

Eleventh. They were alike insensible of pity, alike bent on havoc. But,

while they murdered, one of them frowned and canted, the other grinned

and joked. For our own part, we prefer Jean qui pleure to Jean qui rit.

In the midst of the funeral gloom which overhung Paris, a gaiety

stranger and more ghastly than the horrors of the prison and the

scaffold distinguished the dwelling of Barere. Every morning a crowd of

suitors assembled to implore his protection. He came forth in his rich

dressing-gown, went round the antechamber, dispensed smiles and promises

among the obsequious crowd, addressed himself with peculiar animation to

every handsome woman who appeared in the circle, and complimented her in

the florid style of Gascony on the bloom of her cheeks and the lustre of

her eyes. When he had enjoyed the fear and anxiety of his suppliants he

dismissed them, and flung all their memorials unread into the fire.

This was the best way, he conceived, to prevent arrears of business from

accumulating. Here he was only an imitator. Cardinal Dubois had been in

the habit of clearing his table of papers in the same way. Nor was this

the only point in which we could point out a resemblance between the

worst statesman of the monarchy and the worst statesman of the republic.

Of Barere's peculiar vein of pleasantry a notion may be formed from

an anecdote which one of his intimate associates, a juror of the

revolutionary tribunal, has related. A courtesan who bore a conspicuous

part in the orgies of Clichy implored Barere to use his power against

a head-dress which did not suit her style of face, and which a rival

beauty was trying to bring into fashion. One of the magistrates of the

capital was summoned and received the necessary orders. Aristocracy,

Barere said, was again rearing its front. These new wigs were

counter-revolutionary. He had reason to know that they were made out of

the long fair hair of handsome aristocrats who had died by the national

chopper. Every lady who adorned herself with the relics of criminals

might justly be suspected of incivism. This ridiculous lie imposed on

the authorities of Paris. Female citizens were solemnly warned

against the obnoxious ringlets, and were left to choose between their

head-dresses and their heads. Barere's delight at the success of this

facetious fiction was quite extravagant: he could not tell the story

without going into such convulsions of laughter as made his hearers hope

that he was about to choke. There was something peculiarly tickling and

exhilarating to his mind in this grotesque combination of the frivolous

with the horrible, of false locks and curling-irons with spouting

arteries and reeking hatchets.

But, though Barere succeeded in earning the honourable nicknames of the

Witling of Terror, and the Anacreon of the Guillotine, there was one

place where it was long remembered to his disadvantage that he had, for

a time, talked the language of humanity and moderation. That place was

the Jacobin club. Even after he had borne the chief part in the massacre

of the Girondists, in the murder of the Queen, in the destruction of

Lyons, he durst not show himself within that sacred precinct. At one

meeting of the society, a member complained that the committee to which

the supreme direction of affairs was entrusted, after all the changes

which had been made, still contained one man who was not trustworthy.

Robespierre, whose influence over the Jacobins was boundless, undertook

the defence of his colleague, owned there was some ground for what

had been said, but spoke highly of Barere's industry and aptitude for

business. This seasonable interposition silenced the accuser; but it was

long before the neophyte could venture to appear at the club.

At length a masterpiece of wickedness, unique, we think, even among

Barere's great achievements, obtained his full pardon even from that

rigid conclave. The insupportable tyranny of the Committee of Public

Safety had at length brought the minds of men, and even of women, into

a fierce and hard temper, which defied or welcomed death. The life which

might be any morning taken away, in consequence of the whisper of a

private enemy, seemed of little value. It was something to die after

smiting one of the oppressors; it was something to bequeath to

the surviving tyrants a terror not inferior to that which they had

themselves inspired. Human nature, hunted and worried to the utmost,

now turned furiously to bay. Fouquier Tinville was afraid to walk

the streets; a pistol was snapped at Collot D'Herbois; a young girl,

animated apparently by the spirit of Charlotte Corday, attempted

to obtain an interview with Robespierre. Suspicions arose; she was

searched; and two knives were found about her. She was questioned, and

spoke of the Jacobin domination with resolute scorn and aversion. It is

unnecessary to say that she was sent to the guillotine. Barere declared

from the tribune that the cause of these attempts was evident. Pitt and

his guineas had done the whole. The English Government had organised a

vast system of murder, had armed the hand of Charlotte Corday, and

had now, by similar means, attacked two of the most eminent friends of

liberty in France. It is needless to say that these imputations were,

not only false, but destitute of all show of truth. Nay, they were

demonstrably absurd: for the assassins to whom Barere referred rushed

on certain death, a sure proof that they were not hirelings. The whole

wealth of England would not have bribed any sane person to do what

Charlotte Corday did. But, when we consider her as an enthusiast, her

conduct is perfectly natural. Even those French writers who are childish

enough to believe that the English Government contrived the infernal

machine and strangled the Emperor Paul have fully acquitted Mr Pitt of

all share in the death of Marat and in the attempt on Robespierre.

Yet on calumnies so futile as those which we have mentioned did Barere

ground a motion at which all Christendom stood aghast. He proposed a

decree that no quarter should be given to any English or Hanoverian

soldier. (M. Hippolyte Carnot does his best to excuse this decree. His

abuse of England is merely laughable. England has managed to deal with

enemies of a very different sort from either himself or his hero. One

disgraceful blunder, however, we think it right to notice. M. Hippolyte

Carnot asserts that a motion similar to that of Barere was made in

the English Parliament by the late Lord Fitzwilliam. This assertion is

false. We defy M. Hippolyte Carnot to state the date and terms of

the motion of which he speaks. We do not accuse him of intentional

misrepresentation; but we confidently accuse him of extreme ignorance

and temerity. Our readers will be amused to learn on what authority he

has ventured to publish such a fable. He quotes, not the journals of

the Lords, not the Parliamentary Debates, but a ranting message of

the Executive Directory to the Five Hundred, a message, too, the whole

meaning of which he has utterly misunderstood.) His Carmagnole was

worthy of the proposition with which it concluded. "That one Englishman

should be spared, that for the slaves of George, for the human machines

of York, the vocabulary of our armies should contain such a word as

generosity, this is what the National Convention cannot endure. War

to the death against every English soldier. If last year, at Dunkirk,

quarter had been refused to them when they asked it on their knees,

if our troops had exterminated them all, instead of suffering them to

infest our fortresses by their presence, the English government would

not have renewed its attack on our frontiers this year. It is only the

dead man who never comes back. What is this moral pestilence which has

introduced into our armies false ideas of humanity? That the English

were to be treated with indulgence was the philanthropic notion of the

Brissotines; it was the patriotic practice of Dumourier. But humanity

consists in exterminating our enemies. No mercy to the execrable

Englishman. Such are the sentiments of the true Frenchman; for he

knows that he belongs to a nation revolutionary as nature, powerful

as freedom, ardent as the saltpetre which she has just torn from

the entrails of the earth. Soldiers of liberty, when victory places

Englishmen at your mercy, strike! None of them must return to the

servile soil of Great Britain; none must pollute the free soil of

France."

The Convention, thoroughly tamed and silenced, acquiesced in Barere's

motion without debate. And now at last the doors of the Jacobin Club

were thrown open to the disciple who had surpassed his masters. He was

admitted a member by acclamation, and was soon selected to preside.

For a time he was not without hope that his decree would be carried

into full effect. Intelligence arrived from the seat of war of a sharp

contest between some French and English troops, in which the Republicans

had the advantage, and in which no prisoners had been made. Such

things happen occasionally in all wars. Barere, however, attributed

the ferocity of this combat to his darling decree, and entertained the

Convention with another Carmagnole.

"The Republicans," he said, "saw a division in red uniform at a

distance. The red-coats are attacked with the bayonet. Not one of

them escapes the blows of the Republicans. All the red-coats have been

killed. No mercy, no indulgence, has been shown towards the villains.

Not an Englishman whom the Republicans could reach is now living. How

many prisoners should you guess that we have made? One single prisoner

is the result of this great day."

And now this bad man's craving for blood had become insatiable. The more

he quaffed, the more he thirsted. He had begun with the English;

but soon he came down with a proposition for new massacres. "All the

troops," he said, "of the coalesced tyrants in garrison at Conde,

Valenciennes, Le Quesnoy, and Landrecies, ought to be put to the sword

unless they surrender at discretion in twenty-four hours. The English,

of course, will be admitted to no capitulation whatever. With the

English we have no treaty but death. As to the rest, surrender at

discretion in twenty-four hours, or death, these are our conditions.

If the slaves resist, let them feel the edge of the sword." And then he

waxed facetious. "On these terms the Republic is willing to give them a

lesson in the art of war." At that jest, some hearers, worthy of such

a speaker, set up a laugh. Then he became serious again. "Let the enemy

perish," he cried, "I have already said it from this tribune. It is only

the dead man who never comes back. Kings will not conspire against us in

the grave. Armies will not fight against us when they are annihilated.

Let our war with them be a war of extermination. What pity is due to

slaves whom the Emperor leads to war under the cane; whom the King of

Prussia beats to the shambles with the flat of the sword; and whom the

Duke of York makes drunk with rum and gin?" And at the rum and gin the

Mountain and the galleries laughed again.

If Barere had been able to effect his purpose, it is difficult to

estimate the extent of the calamity which he would have brought on the

human race. No government, however averse to cruelty, could, in justice

to its own subjects, have given quarter to enemies who gave none.

Retaliation would have been, not merely justifiable, but a sacred duty.

It would have been necessary for Howe and Nelson to make every French

sailor whom they took walk the plank. England has no peculiar reason to

dread the introduction of such a system. On the contrary, the operation

of Barere's new law of war would have been more unfavourable to his

countrymen than to ours; for we believe that, from the beginning to the

end of the war, there never was a time at which the number of French

prisoners in England was not greater than the number of English

prisoners in France; and so, we apprehend, it will be in all wars while

England retains her maritime superiority. Had the murderous decree of

the Convention been in force from 1794 to 1815, we are satisfied that,

for every Englishman slain by the French, at least three Frenchmen would

have been put to the sword by the English. It is, therefore, not as

Englishmen, but as members of the great society of mankind, that we

speak with indignation and horror of the change which Barere attempted

to introduce. The mere slaughter would have been the smallest part of

the evil. The butchering of a single unarmed man in cold blood, under an

act of the legislature, would have produced more evil than the carnage

of ten such fields as Albuera. Public law would have been subverted from

the foundations; national enmities would have been inflamed to a degree

of rage which happily it is not easy for us to conceive; cordial peace

would have been impossible. The moral character of the European nations

would have been rapidly and deeply corrupted; for in all countries those

men whose calling is to put their lives in jeopardy for the defence of

the public weal enjoy high consideration, and are considered as the best

arbitrators on points of honour and manly bearing. With the standard of

morality established in the military profession the general standard

of morality must to a great extent sink or rise. It is, therefore, a

fortunate circumstance that, during a long course of years, respect for

the weak and clemency towards the vanquished have been considered as

qualities not less essential to the accomplished soldier than personal

courage. How long would this continue to be the case, if the slaying of

prisoners were a part of the daily duty of the warrior? What man of kind

and generous nature would, under such a system, willingly bear arms?

Who, that was compelled to bear arms, would long continue kind and

generous? And is it not certain that, if barbarity towards the helpless

became the characteristic of military men, the taint must rapidly spread

to civil and to domestic life, and must show itself in all the dealings

of the strong with the weak, of husbands with wives, of employers with

work men, of creditors with debtors?

But, thank God, Barere's decree was a mere dead letter. It was to

be executed by men very different from those who, in the interior of

France, were the instruments of the Committee of Public Safety, who

prated at Jacobin Clubs, and ran to Fouquier Tinville with charges of

incivism against women whom they could not seduce, and bankers from whom

they could not extort money. The warriors who, under Hoche, had guarded

the walls of Dunkirk, and who, under Kleber, had made good the defence

of the wood of Monceaux, shrank with horror from an office more

degrading than that of the hangman. "The Convention," said an officer to

his men, "has sent orders that all the English prisoners shall be shot."

"We will not shoot them" answered a stout-hearted sergeant. "Send them

to the Convention. If the deputies take pleasure in killing a prisoner,

they may kill him themselves, and eat him too, like savages as

they are." This was the sentiment of the whole army. Bonaparte, who

thoroughly understood war, who at Jaffa and elsewhere gave ample proof

that he was not unwilling to strain the laws of war to their utmost

rigour, and whose hatred of England amounted to a folly, always spoke of

Barere's decree with loathing, and boasted that the army had refused to

obey the Convention.

Such disobedience on the part of any other class of citizens would have

been instantly punished by wholesale massacre; but the Committee

of Public Safety was aware that the discipline which had tamed the

unwarlike population of the fields and cities might not answer in camps.

To fling people by scores out of a boat, and, when they catch hold of

it, to chop off their fingers with a hatchet, is undoubtedly a very

agreeable pastime for a thoroughbred Jacobin, when the sufferers are,

as at Nantes, old confessors, young girls, or women with child. But

such sport might prove a little dangerous if tried upon grim ranks of

grenadiers, marked with the scars of Hondschoote, and singed by the

smoke of Fleurus.

Barere, however, found some consolation. If he could not succeed in

murdering the English and the Hanoverians, he was amply indemnified by

a new and vast slaughter of his own countrymen and countrywomen. If the

defence which has been set up for the members of the Committee of Public

Safety had been well founded, if it had been true that they governed

with extreme severity only because the republic was in extreme peril,

it is clear that the severity would have diminished as the peril

diminished. But the fact is, that those cruelties for which the public

danger is made a plea became more and more enormous as the danger became

less and less, and reached the full height when there was no longer any

danger at all. In the autumn of 1793, there was undoubtedly reason to

apprehend that France might be unable to maintain the struggle against

the European coalition. The enemy was triumphant on the frontiers. More

than half the departments disowned the authority of the Convention. But

at that time eight or ten necks a day were thought an ample allowance

for the guillotine of the capital. In the summer of 1794, Bordeaux,

Toulon, Caen, Lyons, Marseilles, had submitted to the ascendency of

Paris. The French arms were victorious under the Pyrenees and on

the Sambre. Brussels had fallen. Prussia announced her intention of

withdrawing from the contest. The Republic, no longer content with

defending her own independence, was beginning to meditate conquest

beyond the Alps and the Rhine. She was now more formidable to her

neighbours than ever Louis the Fourteenth had been. And now the

Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris was not content with forty, fifty,

sixty heads in a morning. It was just after a series of victories, which

destroyed the whole force of the single argument which has been urged

in defence of the system of terror, that the Committee of Public Safety

resolved to infuse into that system an energy hitherto unknown. It was

proposed to reconstruct the Revolutionary Tribunal, and to collect in

the space of two pages the whole revolutionary jurisprudence. Lists of

twelve judges and fifty jurors were made out from among the fiercest

Jacobins. The substantive law was simply this, that whatever the

tribunal should think pernicious to the republic was a capital crime.

The law of evidence was simply this, that whatever satisfied the

jurors was sufficient proof. The law of procedure was of a piece with

everything else. There was to be an advocate against the prisoner, and

no advocate for him. It was expressly declared that, if the jurors were

in any manner convinced of the guilt of the prisoner, they might convict

him without hearing a single witness. The only punishment which the

court could inflict was death.

Robespierre proposed this decree. When he had read it, a murmur rose

from the Convention. The fear which had long restrained the deputies

from opposing the Committee was overcome by a stronger fear. Every

man felt the knife at his throat. "The decree," said one, "is of grave

importance. I move that it be printed and the debate be adjourned. If

such a measure were adopted without time for consideration, I would blow

my brains out at once." The motion for adjournment was seconded. Then

Barere sprang up. "It is impossible," he said, "that there can be

any difference of opinion among us as to a law like this, a law so

favourable in all respects to patriots; a law which insures the speedy

punishment of conspirators. If there is to be an adjournment, I must

insist that it shall not be for more than three days." The opposition

was overawed; the decree was passed; and, during the six weeks which

followed, the havoc was such as has never been known before.

And now the evil was beyond endurance. That timid majority which had

for a time supported the Girondists, and which had, after their

fall, contented itself with registering in silence the decrees of the

Committee of Public Safety, at length drew courage from despair. Leaders

of bold and firm character were not wanting, men such as Fouche and

Tallien, who, having been long conspicuous among the chiefs of the

Mountain, now found that their own lives, or lives still dearer to

them than their own, were in extreme peril. Nor could it be longer kept

secret that there was a schism in the despotic committee. On one side

were Robespierre, Saint Just, and Couthon; on the other, Collot and

Billaud. Barere leaned towards these last, but only leaned towards

them. As was ever his fashion when a great crisis was at hand, he

fawned alternately on both parties, struck alternately at both, and held

himself in readiness to chant the praises or to sign the death-warrant

of either. In any event his Carmagnole was ready. The tree of liberty,

the blood of traitors, the dagger of Brutus, the guineas of perfidious

Albion, would do equally well for Billaud and for Robespierre.

The first attack which was made on Robespierre was indirect. An old

woman named Catherine Theot, half maniac, half impostor, was protected

by him, and exercised a strange influence over his mind; for he was

naturally prone to superstition, and, having abjured the faith in which

he had been brought up, was looking about for something to believe.

Barere drew up a report against Catherine, which contained many

facetious conceits, and ended, as might be expected, with a motion

for sending her and some other wretched creatures of both sexes to

the Revolutionary Tribunal, or, in other words, to death. This report,

however, he did not dare to read to the Convention himself. Another

member, less timid, was induced to farther the cruel buffoonery; and the

real author enjoyed in security the dismay and vexation of Robespierre.

Barere now thought that he had done enough on one side, and that it was

time to make his peace with the other. On the seventh of Thermidor,

he pronounced in the Convention a panegyric on Robespierre. "That

representative of the people," he said, "enjoys a reputation for

patriotism, earned by five years of exertion, and by unalterable

fidelity to the principles of independence and liberty." On the eighth

of Thermidor, it became clear that a decisive struggle was at hand.

Robespierre struck the first blow. He mounted the tribune, and uttered a

long invective on his opponents. It was moved that his discourse

should be printed; and Barere spoke for the printing. The sense of the

Convention soon appeared to be the other way; and Barere apologised for

his former speech, and implored his colleagues to abstain from disputes

which could be agreeable only to Pitt and York. On the next day, the

ever-memorable ninth of Thermidor, came the real tug of war. Tallien,

bravely taking his life in his hand, led the onset. Billaud followed;

and then all that infinite hatred which had long been kept down by

terror burst forth, and swept every barrier before it. When at length

the voice of Robespierre, drowned by the President's bell, and by shouts

of "Down with the tyrant!" had died away in hoarse gasping, Barere rose.

He began with timid and doubtful phrases, watched the effect of

every word he uttered, and, when the feeling of the Assembly had been

unequivocally manifested, declared against Robespierre. But it was not

till the people out of doors, and especially the gunners of Paris, had

espoused the cause of the Convention, that Barere felt quite at

ease. Then he sprang to the tribune, poured forth a Carmagnole about

Pisistratus and Catiline, and concluded by moving that the heads of

Robespierre and Robespierre's accomplices should be cut off without a

trial. The motion was carried. On the following morning the vanquished

members of the Committee of Public Safety and their principal adherents

suffered death. It was exactly one year since Barere had commenced his

career of slaughter by moving the proscription of his old allies the

Girondists. We greatly doubt whether any human being has ever succeeded

in packing more wickedness into the space of three hundred and

sixty-five days.

The ninth of Thermidor is one of the great epochs in the history of

Europe. It is true that the three members of the Committee of Public

Safety who triumphed were by no means better men than the three who

fell. Indeed, we are inclined to think that of these six statesmen the

least bad were Robespierre and Saint Just, whose cruelty was the effect

of sincere fanaticism operating on narrow understandings and acrimonious

tempers. The worst of the six was, beyond all doubt, Barere, who had

no faith in any part of the system which he upheld by persecution; who,

while he sent his fellow-creatures to death for being the third cousins

of royalists, had not in the least made up his mind that a republic

was better than a monarchy; who, while he slew his old friends for

federalism, was himself far more a federalist than any of them; who

had become a murderer merely for his safety, and who continued to be a

murderer merely for his pleasure.

The tendency of the vulgar is to embody everything. Some individual is

selected, and often selected very injudicially, as the representative

of every great movement of the public mind, of every great revolution in

human affairs; and on this individual are concentrated all the love and

all the hatred, all the admiration and all the contempt, which he ought

rightfully to share with a whole party, a whole sect, a whole nation, a

whole generation. Perhaps no human being has suffered so much from this

propensity of the multitude as Robespierre. He is regarded, not merely

as what he was, an envious, malevolent zealot, but as the incarnation of

Terror, as Jacobinism personified. The truth is, that it was not by

him that the system of terror was carried to the last extreme. The most

horrible days in the history of the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris were

those which immediately preceded the ninth of Thermidor. Robespierre had

then ceased to attend the meetings of the sovereign Committee; and the

direction of affairs was really in the hands of Billaud, of Collot, and

of Barere.

It had never occurred to those three tyrants that, in overthrowing

Robespierre, they were overthrowing that system of terror to which they

were more attached than he had ever been. Their object was to go on

slaying even more mercilessly than before. But they had misunderstood

the nature of the great crisis which had at last arrived. The yoke

of the Committee was broken for ever. The Convention had regained

its liberty, had tried its strength, had vanquished and punished

its enemies. A great reaction had commenced. Twenty-four hours after

Robespierre had ceased to live, it was moved and carried, amidst loud

bursts of applause, that the sittings of the Revolutionary Tribunal

should be suspended. Billaud was not at that moment present. He entered

the hall soon after, learned with indignation what had passed, and moved

that the vote should be rescinded. But loud cries of "No, no!" rose

from those benches which had lately paid mute obedience to his commands.

Barere came forward on the same day, and abjured the Convention not to

relax the system of terror. "Beware, above all things," he cried,

"of that fatal moderation which talks of peace and of clemency. Let

aristocracy know that here she will find only enemies sternly bent on

vengeance, and judges who have no pity." But the day of the Carmagnoles

was over: the restraint of fear had been relaxed; and the hatred

with which the nation regarded the Jacobin dominion broke forth with

ungovernable violence. Not more strongly did the tide of public opinion

run against the old monarchy and aristocracy, at the time of the taking

of the Bastile, than it now ran against the tyranny of the Mountain.

From every dungeon the prisoners came forth as they had gone in, by

hundreds. The decree which forbade the soldiers of the republic to give

quarter to the English was repealed by an unanimous vote, amidst loud

acclamations; nor, passed as it was, disobeyed as it was, and rescinded

as it was, can it be with justice considered as a blemish on the fame

of the French nation. The Jacobin Club was refractory. It was suppressed

without resistance. The surviving Girondist deputies, who had concealed

themselves from the vengeance of their enemies in caverns and garrets,

were readmitted to their seats in the Convention. No day passed without

some signal reparation of injustice; no street in Paris was without some

trace of the recent change. In the theatre, the bust of Marat was pulled

down from its pedestal and broken in pieces, amidst the applause of

the audience. His carcass was ejected from the Pantheon. The celebrated

picture of his death, which had hung in the hall of the Convention, was

removed. The savage inscriptions with which the walls of the city had

been covered disappeared; and, in place of death and terror, humanity,

the watchword of the new rulers, was everywhere to be seen. In the

meantime, the gay spirit of France, recently subdued by oppression, and

now elated by the joy of a great deliverance, wantoned in a thousand

forms. Art, taste, luxury, revived. Female beauty regained its

empire--an empire strengthened by the remembrance of all the tender

and all the sublime virtues which women, delicately bred and reputed

frivolous, had displayed during the evil days. Refined manners,

chivalrous sentiments, followed in the train of love. The dawn of the

Arctic summer day after the Arctic winter night, the great unsealing

of the waters, the awakening of animal and vegetable life, the sudden

softening of the air, the sudden blooming of the flowers, the sudden

bursting of old forests into verdure, is but a feeble type of that

happiest and most genial of revolutions, the revolution of the ninth of

Thermidor.

But, in the midst of the revival of all kind and generous sentiments,

there was one portion of the community against which mercy itself seemed

to cry out for vengeance. The chiefs of the late government and their

tools were now never named but as the men of blood, the drinkers of

blood, the cannibals. In some parts of France, where the creatures of

the Mountain had acted with peculiar barbarity, the populace took the

law into its own hands and meted out justice to the Jacobins with the

true Jacobin measure, but at Paris the punishments were inflicted with

order and decency, and were few when compared with the number, and

lenient when compared with the enormity, of the crimes. Soon after the

ninth of Thermidor, two of the vilest of mankind, Fouquier Tinville,

whom Barere had placed at the Revolutionary Tribunal, and Lebon, whom

Barere had defended in the Convention, were placed under arrest. A third

miscreant soon shared their fate, Carrier, the tyrant of Nantes. The

trials of these men brought to light horrors surpassing anything that

Suetonius and Lampridius have related of the worst Caesars. But it was

impossible to punish subordinate agents, who, bad as they were, had only

acted in accordance with the spirit of the government which they served,

and, at the same time, to grant impunity to the heads of the wicked

administration. A cry was raised, both within and without the Convention

for justice on Collot, Billaud, and Barere.

Collot and Billaud, with all their vices, appear to have been men of

resolute natures. They made no submission; but opposed to the hatred

of mankind, at first a fierce resistance, and afterwards a dogged and

sullen endurance. Barere, on the other hand, as soon as he began to

understand the real nature of the revolution of Thermidor, attempted to

abandon the Mountain, and to obtain admission among his old friends of

the moderate party. He declared everywhere that he had never been in

favour of severe measures; that he was a Girondist; that he had always

condemned and lamented the manner in which the Brissotine deputies had

been treated. He now preached mercy from that tribune from which he had

recently preached extermination. "The time," he said, "has come at which

our clemency may be indulged without danger. We may now safely

consider temporary imprisonment as an adequate punishment for political

misdemeanours." It was only a fortnight since, from the same place,

he had declaimed against the moderation which dared even to talk of

clemency; it was only a fortnight since he had ceased to send men and

women to the guillotine of Paris, at the rate of three hundred a week.

He now wished to make his peace with the moderate party at the expense

of the Terrorists, as he had, a year before, made his peace with

the Terrorists at the expense of the moderate party. But he was

disappointed. He had left himself no retreat. His face, his voice, his

rants, his jokes, had become hateful to the Convention. When he spoke

he was interrupted by murmurs. Bitter reflections were daily cast on his

cowardice and perfidy. On one occasion Carnot rose to give an account

of a victory, and so far forgot the gravity of his own character as

to indulge in the sort of oratory which Barere had affected on similar

occasions. He was interrupted by cries of "No more Carmagnoles!" "No

more of Barere's puns!"

At length, five months after the revolution of Thermidor, the Convention

resolved that a committee of twenty-one members should be appointed to

examine into the conduct of Billaud, Collot, and Barere. In some weeks

the report was made. From that report we learn that a paper had been

discovered, signed by Barere, and containing a proposition for adding

the last improvement to the system of terror. France was to be divided

into circuits; itinerant revolutionary tribunals, composed of trusty

Jacobins, were to move from department to department; and the guillotine

was to travel in their train.

Barere, in his defence, insisted that no speech or motion which he had

made in the Convention could, without a violation of the freedom of

debate, be treated as a crime. He was asked how he could resort to such

a mode of defence, after putting to death so many deputies on account of

opinions expressed in the Convention. He had nothing to say, but that

it was much to be regretted that the sound principle had ever been

violated.

He arrogated to himself a large share of the merit of the revolution in

Thermidor. The men who had risked their lives to effect that revolution,

and who knew that, if they had failed, Barere would, in all probability,

have moved the decree for beheading them without a trial, and have drawn

up a proclamation announcing their guilt and their punishment to all

France, were by no means disposed to acquiesce in his claims. He was

reminded that, only forty-eight hours before the decisive conflict,

he had, in the tribune, been profuse of adulation to Robespierre. His

answer to this reproach is worthy of himself. "It was necessary," he

said, "to dissemble. It was necessary to flatter Robespierre's vanity,

and, by panegyric, to impel him to the attack. This was the motive which

induced me to load him with those praises of which you complain. Who

ever blamed Brutus for dissembling with Tarquin?"

The accused triumvirs had only one chance of escaping punishment. There

was severe distress at that moment among the working people of the

capital. This distress the Jacobins attributed to the reaction of

Thermidor, to the lenity with which the aristocrats were now treated,

and to the measures which had been adopted against the chiefs of the

late administration. Nothing is too absurd to be believed by a populace

which has not breakfasted, and which does not know how it is to dine.

The rabble of the Faubourg St Antoine rose, menaced the deputies, and

demanded with loud cries the liberation of the persecuted patriots. But

the Convention was no longer such as it had been, when similar means

were employed too successfully against the Girondists. Its spirit

was roused. Its strength had been proved. Military means were at its

command. The tumult was suppressed: and it was decreed that same evening

that Collot, Billaud, and Barere should instantly be removed to a

distant place of confinement.

The next day the order of the Convention was executed. The account which

Barere has given of his journey is the most interesting and the most

trustworthy part of these Memoirs. There is no witness so infamous that

a court of justice will not take his word against himself; and even

Barere may be believed when he tells us how much he was hated and

despised.

The carriage in which he was to travel passed, surrounded by armed

men, along the street of St Honore. A crowd soon gathered round it and

increased every moment. On the long flight of steps before the church of

St Roch stood rows of eager spectators. It was with difficulty that

the coach could make its way through those who hung upon it, hooting,

cursing, and striving to burst the doors. Barere thought his life in

danger, and was conducted at his own request to a public office, where

he hoped that he might find shelter till the crowd should disperse.

In the meantime, another discussion on his fate took place in the

Convention. It was proposed to deal with him as he had dealt with better

men, to put him out of the pale of the law, and to deliver him at once

without any trial to the headsman. But the humanity which, since

the ninth of Thermidor, had generally directed the public councils

restrained the deputies from taking this course.

It was now night; and the streets gradually became quiet. The clock

struck twelve; and Barere, under a strong guard, again set forth on his

journey. He was conducted over the river to the place where the Orleans

road branches off from the southern boulevard. Two travelling carriages

stood there. In one of them was Billaud, attended by two officers; in

the other two more officers were waiting to receive Barere. Collot was

already on the road.

At Orleans, a city which had suffered cruelly from the Jacobin tyranny,

the three deputies were surrounded by a mob bent on tearing them to

pieces. All the national guards of the neighbourhood were assembled;

and this force was not greater than the emergency required; for the

multitude pursued the carriages far on the road to Blois.

At Amboise the prisoners learned that Tours was ready to receive them.

The stately bridge was occupied by a throng of people, who swore that

the men under whose rule the Loire had been choked with corpses should

have full personal experience of the nature of a noyade. In consequence

of this news, the officers who had charge of the criminals made such

arrangements that the carriages reached Tours at two in the morning, and

drove straight to the post-house. Fresh horses were instantly ordered;

and the travellers started again at full gallop. They had, in truth,

not a moment to lose; for the alarm had been given; lights were seen in

motion; and the yells of a great multitude, disappointed of its revenge,

mingled with the sound of the departing wheels.

At Poitiers there was another narrow escape. As the prisoners quitted

the post-house, they saw the whole population pouring in fury down the

steep declivity on which the city is built. They passed near Niort,

but could not venture to enter it. The inhabitants came forth with

threatening aspect, and vehemently cried to the postillions to stop; but

the postillions urged the horses to full speed, and soon left the town

behind. Through such dangers the men of blood were brought in safety to

Rochelle.

Oleron was the place of their destination, a dreary island beaten by the

raging waves of the Bay of Biscay. The prisoners were confined in the

castle; each had a single chamber, at the door of which a guard was

placed; and each was allowed the ration of a single soldier. They

were not allowed to communicate either with the garrison or with the

population of the island; and soon after their arrival they were denied

the indulgence of walking on the ramparts. The only place where they

were suffered to take exercise was the esplanade where the troops were

drilled.

They had not been long in this situation when news came that the

Jacobins of Paris had made a last attempt to regain ascendency in the

state, that the hall of the Convention had been forced by a furious

crowd, that one of the deputies had been murdered and his head fixed on

a pike, that the life of the President had been for a time in imminent

danger, and that some members of the legislature had not been ashamed to

join the rioters. But troops had arrived in time to prevent a

massacre. The insurgents had been put to flight; the inhabitants of

the disaffected quarters of the capital had been disarmed; the guilty

deputies had suffered the just punishment of their treason; and the

power of the Mountain was broken for ever. These events strengthened the

aversion with which the system of terror and the authors of that system

were regarded. One member of the Convention had moved that the three

prisoners of Oleron should be put to death; another, that they should be

brought back to Paris, and tried by a council of war. These propositions

were rejected. But something was conceded to the party which called for

severity. A vessel which had been fitted out with great expedition at

Rochefort touched at Oleron; and it was announced to Collot and Billaud

that they must instantly go on board. They were forthwith conveyed to

Guiana, where Collot soon drank himself to death with brandy. Billaud

lived many years, shunning his fellow-creatures and shunned by them; and

diverted his lonely hours by teaching parrots to talk. Why a distinction

was made between Barere and his companions in guilt, neither he nor any

other writer, as far as we know, has explained. It does not appear that

the distinction was meant to be at all in his favour; for orders soon

arrived from Paris, that he should be brought to trial for his crimes

before the criminal court of the department of the Upper Charente. He

was accordingly brought back to the continent, and confined during some

months at Saintes, in an old convent which had lately been turned into a

jail.

While he lingered here, the reaction which had followed the great crisis

of Thermidor met with a temporary check. The friends of the House of

Bourbon, presuming on the indulgence with which they had been treated

after the fall of Robespierre, not only ventured to avow their opinions

with little disguise, but at length took arms against the Convention,

and were not put down till much blood had been shed in the streets

of Paris. The vigilance of the public authorities was therefore now

directed chiefly against the Royalists; and the rigour with which the

Jacobins had lately been treated was somewhat relaxed. The Convention,

indeed, again resolved that Barere should be sent to Guiana. But this

decree was not carried into effect. The prisoner, probably with the

connivance of some powerful persons, made his escape from Saintes and

fled to Bordeaux, where he remained in concealment during some years.

There seems to have been a kind of understanding between him and the

government, that, as long as he hid himself, he should not be found,

but that, if he obtruded himself on the public eye, he must take the

consequences of his rashness.

While the constitution of 1795, with its Executive Directory, its

Council of Elders, and its Council of Five Hundred, was in operation,

he continued to live under the ban of the law. It was in vain that he

solicited, even at moments when the politics of the Mountain seemed to

be again in the ascendant, a remission of the sentence pronounced by the

Convention. Even his fellow-regicides, even the authors of the slaughter

of Vendemiaire and of the arrests of Fructidor, were ashamed of him.

About eighteen months after his escape from prison, his name was again

brought before the world. In his own province he still retained some of

his early popularity. He had, indeed, never been in that province since

the downfall of the monarchy. The mountaineers of Gascony were far

removed from the seat of government, and were but imperfectly informed

of what passed there. They knew that their countryman had played an

important part, and that he had on some occasions promoted their local

interests; and they stood by him in his adversity and in his disgrace

with a constancy which presents a singular contrast to his own abject

fickleness. All France was amazed to learn that the department of the

Upper Pyrenees had chosen the proscribed tyrant a member of the Council

of Five Hundred. The council which, like our House of Commons, was the

judge of the election of its own members, refused to admit him. When his

name was read from the roll, a cry of indignation rose from the benches.

"Which of you," exclaimed one of the members, "would sit by the side of

such a monster?" "Not I, not I!" answered a crowd of voices. One deputy

declared that he would vacate his seat if the hall were polluted by the

presence of such a wretch. The election was declared null on the ground

that the person elected was a criminal skulking from justice; and many

severe reflections were thrown on the lenity which suffered him to be

still at large.

He tried to make his peace with the Directory, by writing a bulky

libel on England, entitled, the Liberty of the Seas. He seems to have

confidently expected that this work would produce a great effect. He

printed three thousand copies, and in order to defray the expense of

publication, sold one of his farms for the sum of ten thousand francs.

The book came out; but nobody bought it, in consequence, if Barere is

to be believed, of the villainy of Mr Pitt, who bribed the Directory

to order the Reviewers not to notice so formidable an attack on the

maritime greatness of perfidious Albion.

Barere had been about three years at Bordeaux when he received

intelligence that the mob of the town designed him the honour of a visit

on the ninth of Thermidor, and would probably administer to him what

he had, in his defence of his friend Lebon, described as substantial

justice under forms a little harsh. It was necessary for him to disguise

himself in clothes such as were worn by the carpenters of the dock. In

this garb, with a bundle of wood shavings under his arm, he made his

escape into the vineyards which surrounded the city, lurked during some

days in a peasant's hut, and, when the dreaded anniversary was over,

stole back into the city. A few months later he was again in danger. He

now thought that he should be nowhere so safe as in the neighbourhood

of Paris. He quitted Bordeaux, hastened undetected through those towns

where four years before his life had been in extreme danger, passed

through the capital in the morning twilight, when none were in the

streets except shop-boys taking down the shutters, and arrived safe

at the pleasant village of St Ouen on the Seine. Here he remained in

seclusion during some months. In the meantime Bonaparte returned from

Egypt, placed himself at the head of a coalition of discontented parties,

covered his designs with the authority of the Elders, drove the Five

Hundred out of their hall at the point of the bayonet, and became

absolute monarch of France under the name of First Consul.

Barere assures us that these events almost broke his heart; that he

could not bear to see France again subject to a master; and that if the

representatives had been worthy of that honourable name, they would

have arrested the ambitious general who insulted them. These feelings,

however, did not prevent him from soliciting the protection of the new

government, and from sending to the First Consul a handsome copy of the

essay on the Liberty of the Seas.

The policy of Bonaparte was to cover all the past with a general

oblivion. He belonged half to the Revolution and half to the reaction.

He was an upstart and a sovereign; and had therefore something in

common with the Jacobin, and something in common with the Royalist.

All, whether Jacobins or Royalists, who were disposed to support his

government, were readily received--all, whether Jacobins or Royalists,

who showed hostility to his government, were put down and punished. Men

who had borne a part in the worst crimes of the Reign of Terror, and men

who had fought in the army of Conde, were to be found close together,

both in his antechambers and in his dungeons. He decorated Fouche and

Maury with the same cross. He sent Arena and Georges Cadoudal to the

same scaffold. From a government acting on such principles Barere easily

obtained the indulgence which the Directory had constantly refused to

grant. The sentence passed by the Convention was remitted; and he was

allowed to reside at Paris. His pardon, it is true, was not granted in

the most honourable form; and he remained, during some time, under the

special supervision of the police. He hastened, however, to pay his

court at the Luxembourg palace, where Bonaparte then resided, and was

honoured with a few dry and careless words by the master of France.

Here begins a new chapter of Barere's history. What passed between him

and the Consular government cannot, of course, be so accurately known to

us as the speeches and reports which he made in the Convention. It is,

however, not difficult, from notorious facts, and from the admissions

scattered over these lying Memoirs, to form a tolerably accurate notion

of what took place. Bonaparte wanted to buy Barere: Barere wanted to

sell himself to Bonaparte. The only question was one of price; and there

was an immense interval between what was offered and what was demanded.

Bonaparte, whose vehemence of will, fixedness of purpose, and reliance

on his own genius were not only great but extravagant, looked with

scorn on the most effeminate and dependent of human minds. He was quite

capable of perpetrating crimes under the influence either of ambition or

of revenge: but he had no touch of that accursed monomania, that craving

for blood and tears, which raged in some of the Jacobin chiefs. To

proscribe the Terrorists would have been wholly inconsistent with his

policy; but, of all the classes of men whom his comprehensive system

included, he liked them the least; and Barere was the worst of them.

This wretch had been branded with infamy, first by the Convention, and

then by the Council of Five Hundred. The inhabitants of four or five

great cities had attempted to tear him limb from limb. Nor were his

vices redeemed by eminent talents for administration or legislation. It

would be unwise to place in any honourable or important post a man so

wicked, so odious, and so little qualified to discharge high political

duties. At the same time there was a way in which it seemed likely that

he might be of use to the government. The First Consul, as he afterwards

acknowledged, greatly overrated Barere's powers as a writer. The effect

which the Reports of the Committee of Public Safety had produced by the

camp fires of the Republican armies had been great. Napoleon himself,

when a young soldier, had been delighted by those compositions,

which had much in common with the rhapsodies of his favourite poet,

Macpherson. The taste, indeed, of the great warrior and statesman

was never very pure. His bulletins, his general orders, and his

proclamations, are sometimes, it is true, masterpieces in their kind;

but we too often detect, even in his best writing, traces of Fingal, and

of the Carmagnoles. It is not strange, therefore, that he should have

been desirous to secure the aid of Barere's pen. Nor was this the only

kind of assistance which the old member of the Committee of Public

Safety might render to the Consular government. He was likely to find

admission into the gloomy dens in which those Jacobins whose constancy

was to be overcome by no reverse, or whose crimes admitted of no

expiation, hid themselves from the curses of mankind. No enterprise was

too bold or too atrocious for minds crazed by fanatacism, and familiar

with misery and death. The government was anxious to have information of

what passed in their secret councils; and no man was better qualified to

furnish such information than Barere.

For these reasons the First Consul was disposed to employ Barere as a

writer and as a spy. But Barere--was it possible that he would submit

to such a degradation? Bad as he was, he had played a great part. He had

belonged to that class of criminals who filled the world with the renown

of their crimes; he had been one of a cabinet which had ruled France

with absolute power, and made war on all Europe with signal success.

Nay, he had been, though not the most powerful, yet, with the single

exception of Robespierre, the most conspicuous member of that cabinet.

His name had been a household word at Moscow and at Philadelphia, at

Edinburgh and at Cadiz. The blood of the Queen of France, the blood of

the greatest orators and philosophers of France, was on his hands. He

had spoken; and it had been decreed that the plough should pass over the

great city of Lyons. He had spoken again; and it had been decreed that

the streets of Toulon should be razed to the ground. When depravity is

placed so high as his, the hatred which it inspires is mingled with awe.

His place was with great tyrants, with Critias and Sylla, with Eccelino

and Borgia; not with hireling scribblers and police runners.

"Virtue, I grant you, is an empty boast;

But shall the dignity of vice be lost?"

So sang Pope; and so felt Barere. When it was proposed to him to publish

a journal in defence of the Consular government, rage and shame inspired

him for the first and last time with something like courage. He had

filled as large a space in the eyes of mankind as Mr Pitt or General

Washington; and he was coolly invited to descend at once to the level

of Mr Lewis Goldsmith. He saw, too, with agonies of envy, that a wide

distinction was made between himself and the other statesmen of the

Revolution who were summoned to the aid of the government. Those

statesmen were required, indeed, to make large sacrifices of principle;

but they were not called on to sacrifice what, in the opinion of the

vulgar, constitutes personal dignity. They were made tribunes and

legislators, ambassadors and counsellors of state, ministers, senators,

and consuls. They might reasonably expect to rise with the rising

fortunes of their master; and, in truth, many of them were destined

to wear the badge of his Legion of Honour and of his order of the Iron

Crown; to be arch-chancellors and arch-treasurers, counts, dukes, and

princes. Barere, only six years before, had been far more powerful, far

more widely renowned, than any of them; and now, while they were thought

worthy to represent the majesty of France at foreign courts, while they

received crowds of suitors in gilded antechambers, he was to pass his

life in measuring paragraphs, and scolding correctors of the press. It

was too much. Those lips which had never before been able to fashion

themselves to a No, now murmured expostulation and refusal. "I could

not"--these are his own words--"abase myself to such a point as to serve

the First Consul merely in the capacity of a journalist, while so many

insignificant, low, and servile people, such as the Treilhards, the

Roederers, the Lebruns, the Marets, and others whom it is superfluous to

name, held the first place in this government of upstarts."

This outbreak of spirit was of short duration. Napoleon was inexorable.

It is said indeed that he was, for a moment, half inclined to admit

Barere into the Council of State; but the members of that body

remonstrated in the strongest terms, and declared that such a nomination

would be a disgrace to them all. This plan was therefore relinquished.

Thenceforth Barere's only chance of obtaining the patronage of the

government was to subdue his pride, to forget that there had been a

time when, with three words, he might have had the heads of the three

consuls, and to betake himself, humbly and industriously, to the task of

composing lampoons on England and panegyrics on Bonaparte.

It has been often asserted, we know not on what grounds, that Barere was

employed by the government not only as a writer, but as a censor of

the writings of other men. This imputation he vehemently denies in his

Memoirs; but our readers will probably agree with us in thinking that

his denial leaves the question exactly where it was.

Thus much is certain, that he was not restrained from exercising the

office of censor by any scruple of conscience or honour; for he did

accept an office, compared with which that of censor, odious as it is,

may be called an august and beneficent magistracy. He began to have what

are delicately called relations with the police. We are not sure that

we have formed, or that we can convey, an exact notion of the nature

of Barere's new calling. It is a calling unknown in our country. It has

indeed often happened in England that a plot has been revealed to the

government by one of the conspirators. The informer has sometimes been

directed to carry it fair towards his accomplices, and to let the

evil design come to full maturity. As soon as his work is done, he

is generally snatched from the public gaze, and sent to some obscure

village or to some remote colony. The use of spies, even to this extent,

is in the highest degree unpopular in England; but a political spy by

profession is a creature from which our island is as free as it is from

wolves. In France the race is well-known, and was never more numerous,

more greedy, more cunning, or more savage, than under the government of

Bonaparte.

Our idea of a gentleman in relations with the Consular and Imperial

police may perhaps be incorrect. Such as it is, we will try to convey it

to our readers. We image to ourselves a well-dressed person, with a

soft voice and affable manners. His opinions are those of the society

in which he finds himself, but a little stronger. He often complains,

in the language of honest indignation, that what passes in private

conversation finds its way strangely to the government, and cautions his

associates to take care what they say when they are not sure of their

company. As for himself, he owns that he is indiscreet. He can never

refrain from speaking his mind; and that is the reason that he is not

prefect of a department.

In a gallery of the Palais Royal he overhears two friends talking

earnestly about the King and the Count of Artois. He follows them into

a coffee-house, sits at the table next to them, calls for his half-dish

and his small glass of cognac, takes up a journal, and seems occupied

with the news. His neighbours go on talking without restraint, and in

the style of persons warmly attached to the exiled family. They depart;

and he follows them half round the boulevards till he fairly tracks them

to their apartments, and learns their names from the porters. From

that day every letter addressed to either of them is sent from the

post-office to the police, and opened. Their correspondents become

known to the government, and are carefully watched. Six or eight honest

families, in different parts of France, find themselves at once under

the frown of power without being able to guess what offence they have

given. One person is dismissed from a public office; another learns with

dismay that his promising son has been turned out of the Polytechnic

school.

Next, the indefatigable servant of the state falls in with an old

republican, who has not changed with the times, who regrets the red cap

and the tree of liberty, who has not unlearned the Thee and Thou, and

who still subscribes his letters with "Health and Fraternity." Into the

ears of this sturdy politician our friend pours forth a long series

of complaints. What evil times! What a change since the days when the

Mountain governed France! What is the First Consul but a king under a

new name? What is this Legion of Honour but a new aristocracy? The old

superstition is reviving with the old tyranny. There is a treaty with

the Pope, and a provision for the clergy. Emigrant nobles are returning

in crowds, and are better received at the Tuileries than the men of the

10th of August. This cannot last. What is life without liberty? What

terrors has death to the true patriot? The old Jacobin catches fire,

bestows and receives the fraternal hug, and hints that there will soon

be great news, and that the breed of Harmodius and Brutus is not quite

extinct. The next day he is close prisoner, and all his papers are in

the hands of the government.

To this vocation, a vocation compared with which the life of a beggar,

of a pickpocket, of a pimp, is honourable, did Barere now descend. It

was his constant practice, as often as he enrolled himself in a new

party, to pay his footing with the heads of old friends. He was at first

a Royalist; and he made atonement by watering the tree of liberty with

the blood of Louis. He was then a Girondist; and he made atonement by

murdering Vergniaud and Gensonne. He fawned on Robespierre up to the

eighth of Thermidor; and he made atonement by moving, on the ninth, that

Robespierre should be beheaded without a trial. He was now enlisted

in the service of the new monarchy; and he proceeded to atone for his

republican heresies by sending republican throats to the guillotine.

Among his most intimate associates was a Gascon named Demerville, who

had been employed in an office of high trust under the Committee of

Public Safety. This man was fanatically attached to the Jacobin system

of politics, and, in conjunction with other enthusiasts of the same

class, formed a design against the First Consul. A hint of this design

escaped him in conversation with Barere. Barere carried the intelligence

to Lannes, who commanded the Consular Guards. Demerville was arrested,

tried, and beheaded; and among the witnesses who appeared against him

was his friend Barere.

The account which Barere has given of these transactions is studiously

confused and grossly dishonest. We think, however, that we can discern,

through much falsehood and much artful obscurity, some truths which he

labours to conceal. It is clear to us that the government suspected him

of what the Italians call a double treason. It was natural that such

a suspicion should attach to him. He had, in times not very remote,

zealously preached the Jacobin doctrine, that he who smites a tyrant

deserves higher praise than he who saves a citizen. Was it possible

that the member of the Committee of Public Safety, the king-killer, the

queen-killer, could in earnest mean to deliver his old confederates, his

bosom friends, to the executioner, solely because they had planned an

act which, if there were any truth in his own Carmagnoles, was in the

highest degree virtuous and glorious? Was it not more probable that he

was really concerned in the plot, and that the information which he gave

was merely intended to lull or to mislead the police? Accordingly,

spies were set on the spy. He was ordered to quit Paris, and not to come

within twenty leagues till he received further orders. Nay, he ran no

small risk of being sent, with some of his old friends, to Madagascar.

He made his peace, however, with the government so far, that he was not

only permitted, during some years, to live unmolested, but was employed

in the lowest sort of political drudgery. In the summer of 1803, while

he was preparing to visit the south of France, he received a letter

which deserves to be inserted. It was from Duroc, who is well known to

have enjoyed a large share of Napoleon's confidence and favour.

"The First Consul, having been informed that Citizen Barere is about to

set out for the country, desires that he will stay at Paris.

"Citizen Barere will every week draw up a report on the state of

public opinion on the proceedings of the government, and generally on

everything which, in his judgment, it will be interesting to the First

Consul to learn.

"He may write with perfect freedom.

"He will deliver his reports under seal into General Duroc's own hand,

and General Duroc will deliver them to the First Consul. But it is

absolutely necessary that nobody should suspect that this species of

communication takes place; and, should any such suspicion get abroad,

the First Consul will cease to receive the reports of Citizen Barere.

"It will also be proper that Citizen Barere should frequently insert in

the journals articles tending to animate the public mind, particularly

against the English."

During some years Barere continued to discharge the functions

assigned to him by his master. Secret reports, filled with the talk

of coffee-houses, were carried by him every week to the Tuileries. His

friends assure us that he took especial pains to do all the harm in his

power to the returned emigrants. It was not his fault if Napoleon was

not apprised of every murmur and every sarcasm which old marquesses who

had lost their estates, and old clergymen who had lost their benefices,

uttered against the imperial system. M. Hippolyte Carnot, we grieve to

say, is so much blinded by party spirit that he seems to reckon this

dirty wickedness among his hero's titles to public esteem.

Barere was, at the same time, an indefatigable journalist and

pamphleteer. He set up a paper directed against England, and called the

"Memorial Antibritannique". He planned a work entitled, "France made

great and illustrious by Napoleon." When the Imperial government was

established, the old regicide made himself conspicuous even among the

crowd of flatterers by the peculiar fulsomeness of his adulation.

He translated into French a contemptible volume of Italian verses,

entitled, "The Poetic Crown, composed on the glorious accession of

Napoleon the First, by the Shepherds of Arcadia." He commenced a new

series of Carmagnoles very different from those which had charmed

the Mountain. The title of Emperor of the French, he said, was mean;

Napoleon ought to be Emperor of Europe. King of Italy was too humble an

appellation; Napoleon's style ought to be King of Kings.

But Barere laboured to small purpose in both his vocations. Neither as

a writer nor as a spy was he of much use. He complains bitterly that

his paper did not sell. While the "Journal des Debats", then flourishing

under the able management of Geoffroy, had a circulation of at least

twenty thousand copies, the "Memorial Antibritannique" never, in its

most prosperous times, had more than fifteen hundred subscribers; and

these subscribers were, with scarcely an exception, persons residing far

from Paris, probably Gascons, among whom the name of Barere had not yet

lost its influence.

A writer who cannot find readers generally attributes the public neglect

to any cause rather than to the true one; and Barere was no exception to

the general rule. His old hatred to Paris revived in all its fury.

That city, he says, has no sympathy with France. No Parisian cares to

subscribe to a journal which dwells on the real wants and interests of

the country. To a Parisian nothing is so ridiculous as patriotism. The

higher classes of the capital have always been devoted to England.

A corporal from London is better received among them than a French

general. A journal, therefore, which attacks England has no chance of

their support.

A much better explanation of the failure of the "Memorial" was given

by Bonaparte at St Helena. "Barere," said he to Barry O'Meara, "had

the reputation of being a man of talent: but I did not find him so.

I employed him to write; but he did not display ability. He used many

flowers of rhetoric, but no solid argument; nothing but coglionerie

wrapped up in high-sounding language."

The truth is that, though Barere was a man of quick parts, and could do

with ease what he could do at all, he had never been a good writer. In

the day of his power he had been in the habit of haranguing an excitable

audience on exciting topics. The faults of his style passed uncensured;

for it was a time of literary as well as of civil lawlessness, and a

patriot was licensed to violate the ordinary rules of composition as

well as the ordinary rules of jurisprudence and of social morality. But

there had now been a literary as well as a civil reaction. As there was

again a throne and a court, a magistracy, a chivalry, and a hierarchy,

so was there a revival of classical taste. Honour was again paid to

the prose of Pascal and Massillon, and to the verse of Racine and

La Fontaine. The oratory which had delighted the galleries of the

Convention was not only as much out of date as the language of

Villehardouin and Joinville, but was associated in the public mind

with images of horror. All the peculiarities of the Anacreon of the

guillotine, his words unknown to the Dictionary of the Academy, his

conceits and his jokes, his Gascon idioms and his Gascon hyperboles, had

become as odious as the cant of the Puritans was in England after the

Restoration.

Bonaparte, who had never loved the men of the Reign of Terror, had now

ceased to fear them. He was all-powerful and at the height of glory;

they were weak and universally abhorred. He was a sovereign; and it

is probable that he already meditated a matrimonial alliance with

sovereigns. He was naturally unwilling, in his new position, to hold

any intercourse with the worst class of Jacobins. Had Barere's literary

assistance been important to the government, personal aversion might

have yielded to considerations of policy; but there was no motive for

keeping terms with a worthless man who had also proved a worthless

writer. Bonaparte, therefore, gave loose to his feelings. Barere was not

gently dropped, not sent into an honourable retirement, but spurned

and scourged away like a troublesome dog. He had been in the habit of

sending six copies of his journal on fine paper daily to the Tuileries.

Instead of receiving the thanks and praises which he expected, he was

drily told that the great man had ordered five copies to be sent back.

Still he toiled on; still he cherished a hope that at last Napoleon

would relent, and that at last some share in the honours of the state

would reward so much assiduity and so much obsequiousness. He was

bitterly undeceived. Under the Imperial constitution the electoral

colleges of the departments did not possess the right of choosing

senators or deputies, but merely that of presenting candidates. From

among these candidates the emperor named members of the senate, and the

senate named members of the legislative body. The inhabitants of the

Upper Pyrenees were still strangely partial to Barere. In the year 1805,

they were disposed to present him as a candidate for the senate. On this

Napoleon expressed the highest displeasure; and the president of the

electoral college was directed to tell the voters, in plain terms, that

such a choice would be disgraceful to the department. All thought of

naming Barere a candidate for the senate was consequently dropped.

But the people of Argeles ventured to name him a candidate for the

legislative body. That body was altogether destitute of weight and

dignity; it was not permitted to debate; its only function was to vote

in silence for whatever the government proposed. It is not easy to

understand how any man who had sat in free and powerful deliberative

assemblies could condescend to bear a part in such a mummery. Barere,

however, was desirous of a place even in this mock legislature; and a

place even in this mock legislature was refused to him. In the whole

senate he had not a single vote.

Such treatment was sufficient, it might have been thought, to move the

most abject of mankind to resentment. Still, however, Barere cringed and

fawned on. His letters came weekly to the Tuileries till the year

1807. At length, while he was actually writing the two hundred and

twenty-third of the series, a note was put into his hands. It was from

Duroc, and was much more perspicuous than polite. Barere was requested

to send no more of his Reports to the palace, as the Emperor was too

busy to read them.

Contempt, says the Indian proverb, pierces even the shell of the

tortoise; and the contempt of the Court was felt to the quick even by

the callous heart of Barere. He had humbled himself to the dust; and he

had humbled himself in vain. Having been eminent among the rulers of

a great and victorious state, he had stooped to serve a master in the

vilest capacities; and he had been told that, even in those capacities,

he was not worthy of the pittance which had been disdainfully flung to

him. He was now degraded below the level even of the hirelings whom the

government employed in the most infamous offices. He stood idle in

the market-place, not because he thought any office too infamous, but

because none would hire him.

Yet he had reason to think himself fortunate; for, had all that

is avowed in these Memoirs been known, he would have received very

different tokens of the Imperial displeasure. We learn from himself

that, while publishing daily columns of flattery on Bonaparte, and while

carrying weekly budgets of calumny to the Tuileries, he was in close

connection with the agents whom the Emperor Alexander, then by no means

favourably disposed towards France, employed to watch all that passed at

Paris; was permitted to read their secret despatches; was consulted by

them as to the temper of the public mind and the character of Napoleon;

and did his best to persuade them that the government was in a tottering

condition, and that the new sovereign was not, as the world supposed,

a great statesman and soldier. Next, Barere, still the flatterer and

talebearer of the Imperial Court, connected himself in the same manner

with the Spanish envoy. He owns that with that envoy he had relations

which he took the greatest pains to conceal from his own government;

that they met twice a day; and that their conversation chiefly turned

on the vices of Napoleon; on his designs against Spain, and on the best

mode of rendering those designs abortive. In truth, Barere's baseness

was unfathomable. In the lowest deeps of shame he found out lower deeps.

It is bad to be a sycophant; it is bad to be a spy. But even among

sycophants and spies there are degrees of meanness. The vilest sycophant

is he who privily slanders the master on whom he fawns; and the vilest

spy is he who serves foreigners against the government of his native

land.

From 1807 to 1814 Barere lived in obscurity, railing as bitterly as his

craven cowardice would permit against the Imperial administration,

and coming sometimes unpleasantly across the police. When the Bourbons

returned, he, as might have been expected, became a royalist, and

wrote a pamphlet setting forth the horrors of the system from which the

Restoration had delivered France, and magnifying the wisdom and goodness

which had dictated the charter. He who had voted for the death of Louis,

he who had moved the decree for the trial of Marie Antoinette, he whose

hatred of monarchy had led him to make war even upon the sepulchres of

ancient monarchs, assures us, with great complacency, that "in this work

monarchical principles and attachment to the House of Bourbon are nobly

expressed." By this apostasy he got nothing, not even any additional

infamy; for his character was already too black to be blackened.

During the hundred days he again emerged for a very short time into

public life; he was chosen by his native district a member of the

Chamber of Representatives. But, though that assembly was composed in

a great measure of men who regarded the excesses of the Jacobins with

indulgence, he found himself an object of general aversion. When the

President first informed the Chamber that M. Barere requested a hearing,

a deep and indignant murmur ran round the benches. After the battle of

Waterloo, Barere proposed that the Chamber should save France from the

victorious enemy, by putting forth a proclamation about the pass of

Thermopylae and the Lacedaemonian custom of wearing flowers in times of

extreme danger. Whether this composition, if it had then appeared, would

have stopped the English and Prussian armies, is a question respecting

which we are left to conjecture. The Chamber refused to adopt this last

of the Carmagnoles.

The Emperor had abdicated. The Bourbons returned. The Chamber of

Representatives, after burlesquing during a few weeks the proceedings

of the National Convention, retired with the well-earned character of

having been the silliest political assembly that had met in France.

Those dreaming pedants and praters never for a moment comprehended

their position. They could never understand that Europe must be either

conciliated or vanquished; that Europe could be conciliated only by

the restoration of Louis, and vanquished only by means of a dictatorial

power entrusted to Napoleon. They would not hear of Louis; yet they

would not hear of the only measures which could keep him out. They

incurred the enmity of all foreign powers by putting Napoleon at their

head; yet they shackled him, thwarted him, quarrelled with him about

every trifle, abandoned him on the first reverse. They then opposed

declamations and disquisitions to eight hundred thousand bayonets;

played at making a constitution for their country, when it depended on

the indulgence of the victor whether they should have a country; and

were at last interrupted, in the midst of their babble about the rights

of man and the sovereignty of the people, by the soldiers of Wellington

and Blucher.

A new Chamber of Deputies was elected, so bitterly hostile to the

Revolution that there was no small risk of a new Reign of Terror. It

is just, however, to say that the king, his ministers, and his allies

exerted themselves to restrain the violence of the fanatical royalists,

and that the punishments inflicted, though in our opinion unjustifiable,

were few and lenient when compared with those which were demanded by M.

de Labourdonnaye and M. Hyde de Neuville. We have always heard, and are

inclined to believe, that the government was not disposed to treat

even the regicides with severity. But on this point the feeling of the

Chamber of Deputies was so strong that it was thought necessary to make

some concession. It was enacted, therefore, that whoever, having voted

in January 1793 for the death of Louis the Sixteenth, had in any manner

given in an adhesion to the government of Bonaparte during the hundred

days should be banished for life from France. Barere fell within this

description. He had voted for the death of Louis; and he had sat in the

Chamber of Representatives during the hundred days.

He accordingly retired to Belgium, and resided there, forgotten by all

mankind, till the year 1830. After the revolution of July he was at

liberty to return to France; and he fixed his residence in his native

province. But he was soon involved in a succession of lawsuits with his

nearest relations--"three fatal sisters and an ungrateful brother," to

use his own words. Who was in the right is a question about which we

have no means of judging, and certainly shall not take Barere's word.

The Courts appear to have decided some points in his favour and some

against him. The natural inference is, that there were faults on all

sides. The result of this litigation was that the old man was reduced to

extreme poverty, and was forced to sell his paternal house.

As far as we can judge from the few facts which remain to be mentioned,

Barere continued Barere to the last. After his exile he turned Jacobin

again, and, when he came back to France, joined the party of the

extreme left in railing at Louis Philippe, and at all Louis Philippe's

ministers. M. Casimir Perier, M. De Broglie, M. Guizot, and M. Thiers,

in particular, are honoured with his abuse; and the King himself is held

up to execration as a hypocritical tyrant. Nevertheless, Barere had no

scruple about accepting a charitable donation of a thousand francs a

year from the privy purse of the sovereign whom he hated and reviled.

This pension, together with some small sums occasionally doled out

to him by the department of the Interior, on the ground that he was

a distressed man of letters, and by the department of Justice, on the

ground that he had formerly held a high judicial office, saved him from

the necessity of begging his bread. Having survived all his colleagues

of the renowned Committee of Public Safety, and almost all his

colleagues of the Convention, he died in January 1841. He had attained

his eighty-sixth year.

We have now laid before our readers what we believe to be a just account

of this man's life. Can it be necessary for us to add anything for the

purpose of assisting their judgment of his character? If we were writing

about any of his colleagues in the Committee of Public Safety, about

Carnot, about Robespierre, or Saint Just, nay, even about Couthon,

Collot, or Billaud, we might feel it necessary to go into a full

examination of the arguments which have been employed to vindicate or

to excuse the system of Terror. We could, we think, show that France

was saved from her foreign enemies, not by the system of Terror, but in

spite of it; and that the perils which were made the plea of the violent

policy of the Mountain were to a great extent created by that very

policy. We could, we think, also show that the evils produced by

the Jacobin administration did not terminate when it fell; that it

bequeathed a long series of calamities to France and to Europe; that

public opinion, which had during two generations been constantly

becoming more and more favourable to civil and religious freedom,

underwent, during the days of Terror, a change of which the traces are

still to be distinctly perceived. It was natural that there should

be such a change, when men saw that those who called themselves the

champions of popular rights had compressed into the space of twelve

months more crimes than the Kings of France, Merovingian, Carlovingian,

and Capetian, had perpetrated in twelve centuries. Freedom was regarded

as a great delusion. Men were willing to submit to the government of

hereditary princes, of fortunate soldiers, of nobles, of priests; to

any government but that of philosophers and philanthropists. Hence the

imperial despotism, with its enslaved press and its silent tribune,

its dungeons stronger than the old Bastile, and its tribunals more

obsequious than the old parliaments. Hence the restoration of the

Bourbons and of the Jesuits, the Chamber of 1815 with its categories of

proscription, the revival of the feudal spirit, the encroachments of

the clergy, the persecution of the Protestants, the appearance of a new

breed of De Montforts and Dominics in the full light of the nineteenth

century. Hence the admission of France into the Holy Alliance, and the

war waged by the old soldiers of the tricolor against the liberties of

Spain. Hence, too, the apprehensions with which, even at the present

day, the most temperate plans for widening the narrow basis of

the French representation are regarded by those who are especially

interested in the security of property and maintenance of order. Half

a century has not sufficed to obliterate the stain which one year of

depravity and madness has left on the noblest of causes.

Nothing is more ridiculous than the manner in which writers like M.

Hippolyte Carnot defend or excuse the Jacobin administration, while

they declaim against the reaction which followed. That the reaction has

produced and is still producing much evil, is perfectly true. But what

produced the reaction? The spring flies up with a force proportioned to

that with which it has been pressed down. The pendulum which is drawn

far in one direction swings as far in the other. The joyous madness of

intoxication in the evening is followed by languor and nausea on the

morrow. And so, in politics, it is the sure law that every excess shall

generate its opposite; nor does he deserve the name of a statesman

who strikes a great blow without fully calculating the effect of the

rebound. But such calculation was infinitely beyond the reach of the

authors of the Reign of Terror. Violence, and more violence, blood,

and more blood, made up their whole policy. In a few months these poor

creatures succeeded in bringing about a reaction, of which none of them

saw, and of which none of us may see the close; and, having brought it

about, they marvelled at it; they bewailed it; they execrated it; they

ascribed it to everything but the real cause--their own immortality and

their own profound incapacity for the conduct of great affairs.

These, however, are considerations to which, on the present occasion, it

is hardly necessary for us to advert; for, be the defence which has been

set up for the Jacobin policy good or bad, it is a defence which cannot

avail Barere. From his own life, from his own pen, from his own mouth,

we can prove that the part which he took in the work of blood is to be

attributed, not even to sincere fanaticism, not even to misdirected

and ill-regulated patriotism, but either to cowardice, or to delight in

human misery. Will it be pretended that it was from public spirit that

he murdered the Girondists? In these very Memoirs he tells us that he

always regarded their death as the greatest calamity that could befall

France. Will it be pretended that it was from public spirit that he

raved for the head of the Austrian woman? In these very Memoirs he tells

us that the time spent in attacking her was ill spent, and ought to have

been employed in concerting measures of national defence. Will it be

pretended that he was induced by sincere and earnest abhorrence of

kingly government to butcher the living and to outrage the dead; he who

invited Napoleon to take the title of King of Kings, he who assures us

that after the Restoration he expressed in noble language his attachment

to monarchy, and to the house of Bourbon? Had he been less mean,

something might have been said in extenuation of his cruelty. Had he

been less cruel, something might have been said in extenuation of his

meanness. But for him, regicide and court-spy, for him who patronised

Lebon and betrayed Demerville, for him who wantoned alternately in

gasconades of Jacobinism and gasconades of servility, what excuse has

the largest charity to offer?

We cannot conclude without saying something about two parts of his

character, which his biographer appears to consider as deserving of

high admiration. Barere, it is admitted, was somewhat fickle; but in two

things he was consistent, in his love of Christianity, and in his hatred

to England. If this were so, we must say that England is much more

beholden to him than Christianity.

It is possible that our inclinations may bias our judgment; but we think

that we do not flatter ourselves when we say that Barere's aversion to

our country was a sentiment as deep and constant as his mind was

capable of entertaining. The value of this compliment is indeed somewhat

diminished by the circumstance that he knew very little about us.

His ignorance of our institutions, manners, and history is the less

excusable, because, according to his own account, he consorted much,

during the peace of Amiens, with Englishmen of note, such as that

eminent nobleman Lord Greaten, and that not less eminent philosopher

Mr Mackensie Coefhis. In spite, however, of his connection with these

well-known ornaments of our country, he was so ill-informed about us as

to fancy that our government was always laying plans to torment him.

If he was hooted at Saintes, probably by people whose relations he had

murdered, it was because the cabinet of St James's had hired the mob. If

nobody would read his bad books it was because the cabinet of St James's

had secured the Reviewers. His accounts of Mr Fox, of Mr Pitt, of the

Duke of Wellington, of Mr Canning, swarm with blunders surpassing even

the ordinary blunders committed by Frenchmen who write about England. Mr

Fox and Mr Pitt, he tells us, were ministers in two different reigns.

Mr Pitt's sinking fund was instituted in order to enable England to pay

subsidies to the powers allied against the French republic. The Duke

of Wellington's house in Hyde Park was built by the nation, which twice

voted the sum of 200,000 pounds for the purpose. This, however, is

exclusive of the cost of the frescoes, which were also paid for out of

the public purse. Mr Canning was the first Englishman whose death

Europe had reason to lament; for the death of Lord Ward, a relation, we

presume, of Lord Greaten and Mr Coefhis, had been an immense benefit to

mankind.

Ignorant, however, as Barere was, he knew enough of us to hate us; and

we persuade ourselves that, had he known us better, he would have hated

us more. The nation which has combined, beyond all example and all hope,

the blessings of liberty with those of order, might well be an object

of aversion to one who had been false alike to the cause of order and

to the cause of liberty. We have had amongst us intemperate zeal for

popular rights; we have had amongst us also the intemperance of loyalty.

But we have never been shocked by such a spectacle as the Barere

of 1794, or as the Barere of 1804. Compared with him, our fiercest

demagogues have been gentle; compared with him, our meanest courtiers

have been manly. Mix together Thistlewood and Bubb Doddington; and you

are still far from having Barere. The antipathy between him and us is

such, that neither for the crimes of his earlier nor for those of his

later life does our language, rich as it is, furnish us with adequate

names. We have found it difficult to relate his history without having

perpetual recourse to the French vocabulary of horror, and to the French

vocabulary of baseness. It is not easy to give a notion of his conduct

in the Convention, without using those emphatic terms, guillotinade,

noyade, fusillade, mitraillade. It is not easy to give a notion of his

conduct under the Consulate and the Empire without borrowing such words

as mouchard and mouton.

We therefore like his invectives against us much better than

anything else that he has written; and dwell on them, not merely with

complacency, but with a feeling akin to gratitude. It was but little

that he could do to promote the honour of our country; but that little

he did strenuously and constantly. Renegade, traitor, slave, coward,

liar, slanderer, murderer, hack writer, police-spy--the one small

service which he could render to England was to hate her: and such as he

was may all who hate her be!

We cannot say that we contemplate with equal satisfaction that fervent

and constant zeal for religion which, according to M. Hippolyte Carnot,

distinguished Barere; for, as we think that whatever brings dishonour on

religion is a serious evil, we had, we own, indulged a hope that Barere

was an atheist. We now learn, however, that he was at no time even a

sceptic, that he adhered to his faith through the whole Revolution, and

that he has left several manuscript works on divinity. One of these is

a pious treatise, entitled "Of Christianity, and of its Influence."

Another consists of meditations on the Psalms, which will doubtless

greatly console and edify the Church.

This makes the character complete. Whatsoever things are false,

whatsoever things are dishonest, whatsoever things are unjust,

whatsoever things are impure, whatsoever things are hateful, whatsoever

things are of evil report, if there be any vice, and if there be any

infamy, all these things, we knew, were blended in Barere. But one thing

was still wanting; and that M. Hippolyte Carnot has supplied. When to

such an assemblage of qualities a high profession of piety is added,

the effect becomes overpowering. We sink under the contemplation of such

exquisite and manifold perfection; and feel, with deep humility, how

presumptuous it was in us to think of composing the legend of this

beatified athlete of the faith, St Bertrand of the Carmagnoles.

Something more we had to say about him. But let him go. We did not seek

him out, and will not keep him longer. If those who call themselves his

friends had not forced him on our notice we should never have vouchsafed

to him more than a passing word of scorn and abhorrence, such as we

might fling at his brethren, Hebert and Fouquier Tinville, and Carrier

and Lebon. We have no pleasure in seeing human nature thus degraded. We

turn with disgust from the filthy and spiteful Yahoos of the fiction;

and the filthiest and most spiteful Yahoo of the fiction was a noble

creature when compared with the Barere of history. But what is no

pleasure M. Hippolyte Carnot has made a duty. It is no light thing

that a man in high and honourable public trust, a man who, from his

connections and position, may not unnaturally be supposed to speak the

sentiments of a large class of his countrymen, should come forward to

demand approbation for a life black with every sort of wickedness, and

unredeemed by a single virtue. This M. Hippolyte Carnot has done. By

attempting to enshrine this Jacobin carrion, he has forced us to gibbet

it; and we venture to say that, from the eminence of infamy on which we

have placed it, he will not easily take it down.