of oratory was now formed. It was not altogether without ingenuity and
liveliness. But in any other age or country it would have been thought
unfit for the deliberations of a grave assembly and still more unfit for
state papers. It might, per haps, succeed at a meeting of a Protestant
Association in Exeter Hall, at a Repeal dinner in Ireland, after men
had well drunk, or in an American oration on the Fourth of July. No
legislative body would now endure it. But in France, during the reign
of the Convention, the old laws of composition were held in as much
contempt as the old government or the old creed. Correct and noble
diction belonged, like the etiquette of Versailles and the solemnities
of Notre Dame, to an age which had passed away. Just as a swarm of
ephemeral constitutions, democratic, directorial, and consular,
sprang from the decay of the ancient monarchy; just as a swarm of new
superstitions, the worship of the Goddess of Reason, and the fooleries
of the Theo-philanthropists, sprang from the decay of the ancient
Church; even so out of the decay of the ancient French eloquence sprang
new fashions of eloquence, for the understanding of which new grammars
and dictionaries were necessary. The same innovating spirit which
altered the common phrases of salutation, which turned hundreds of Johns
and Peters into Seævolas and Aristogitons, and which expelled Sunday and
Monday, January and February, Lady-day and Christmas, from the calendar,
in order to substitute Decadi and Primidi, Nivose and Pluviose, Feasts
of Opinion and Feasts of the Supreme Being, changed all the forms
{472}of official correspondence. For the calm, guarded, and sternly
courteous language which governments had long been accustomed to employ,
were substituted puns, interjections, Ossianic rants, rhetoric worthy
only of a schoolboy, scurrility worthy only of a fishwife. Of the
phraseology which was now thought to be peculiarly well suited to a
report or a manifesto Barère had a greater command than any man of his
time, and, during the short and sharp paroxysm of the revolutionary
delirium, passed for a great orator. When the fit was over, he was
considered as what he really was, a man of quick apprehension and fluent
elocution, with no originality, with little information, and with
a taste as bad as his heart. His Reports were popularly called
Carmagnoles. A few months ago we should have had some difficulty in
conveying to an English reader an exact notion of the state papers to
which this appellation was given. Fortunately a noble and distinguished
person, whom her Majesty’s Ministers have thought qualified to fill the
most important post in the empire, has made our task easy. Whoever has
read Lord Ellenborough’s proclamations is able to form a complete idea
of a Carmagnole.
The effect which Barère’s discourses at one time produced is not to be
wholly attributed to the perversion of the national taste. The occasions
on which he rose were frequently such as would have secured to the worst
speaker a favourable hearing. When any military advantage had been
gained, he was generally deputed by the Committee of Public Safety to
announce the good news. The hall resounded with applause as he mounted
the tribune, holding the despatches in his hand. Deputies and strangers
listened with delight while he told them that victory was the {473}order
of the day; that the guineas of Pitt had been vainly lavished to hire
machines six feet high, carrying-guns; that the flight of the English
leopard deserved to be celebrated by Tyrtæus; and that the saltpetre dug
out of the cellars of Paris had been turned into thunder, which would
crush the Titan brethren, George and Francis.
Meanwhile the trial of the accused Girondists, who were under arrest in
Paris, came on. They flattered themselves with a vain hope of escape.
They placed some reliance on their innocence, and some reliance on their
eloquence. They thought that shame would suffice to restrain any
man, however violent and cruel, from publicly committing the flagrant
iniquity of condemning them to death. The Revolutionary Tribunal was new
to its functions. No member of the Convention had yet been executed;
and it was probable that the boldest Jacobin would shrink from being
the first to violate the sanctity which was supposed to belong to the
representatives of the people.
The proceedings lasted some days. Gensonnè and Brissot defended
themselves with great ability and presence of mind against the vile
Hébert and Chaumette, who appeared as accusers. The eloquent voice of
Vergniaud was heard for the last time. He pleaded his own cause and that
of his friends, with such force of reason and elevation of sentiment
that a murmur of pity and admiration rose from the audience. Nay, the
court itself, not yet accustomed to riot in daily carnage, showed signs
of emotion. The sitting was adjourned; and a rumour went forth that
there would be an acquittal. The Jacobins met, breathing vengeance.
Robespierre undertook to be their organ. He rose on the following day
in the Convention, and proposed a {474}decree of such atrocity that even
among the acts of that year it can hardly be paralleled. By this decree
the tribunal was empowered to cut short the defence of the prisoners,
to pronounce the case clear, and to pass immediate judgment. One
deputy made a faint opposition. Barère instantly sprang up to support
Robespierre--Barère, the federalist; Barère, the author of that
Commission of Twelve which was amoung the chief causes of the hatred
borne by Paris to the Girondists; Barère, who in these Memoirs denies
that he ever took any part against the Girondists; Barère, who has the
effrontery to declare that he greatly loved and esteemed Vergniaud. The
decree was passed; and the tribunal, without suffering the prisoners to
conclude what they had to say, pronounced them guilty.
The following day was the saddest in the sad history of the Revolution.
The sufferers were so innocent, so brave, so eloquent, so accomplished,
so young. Some of them were graceful and handsome youths of six or seven
and twenty. Vergniaud and Gensonnè were little more than thirty. They
had been only a few months engaged in public affairs. In a few months
the fame of their genius had filled Europe; and they were to die for
no crime but this, that they had wished to combine order, justice, and
mercy with freedom. Their great fault was want of courage. We mean want
of political courage--of that courage which is proof to clamour and
obloquy, and which meets great emergencies by daring and decisive
measures. Alas! they had but too good an opportunity of proving that
they did not want courage to endure with manly cheerfulness the worst
that could be inflicted by such tyrants as St. Just, and such slaves as
Barère. {475}They were not the only victims of the noble cause. Madame
Roland followed them to the scaffold with a spirit as heroic as their
own. Her husband was in a safe hiding-place, but could not bear to
survive her. His body was found on the high road near Rouen. He had
fallen on his sword. Condorcet swallowed opium. At Bordeaux the steel
fell on the necks of the bold and quick-witted Guadet and of Barbaroux,
the chief of those enthusiasts from the Rhone whose valour, in the great
crisis of the tenth of August, had turned back the tide of battle from
the Louvre to the Tuileries. In a held near the Garonne was found all
that the wolves had left of Pétion, once honoured, greatly indeed
beyond his deserts, as the model of republican virtue. We are far from
regarding even the best of the Girondists with unmixed admiration; but
history owes to them this honourable testimony, that, being free to
choose whether they would be oppressors or victims, they deliberately
and firmly resolved rather to suffer injustice than to inflict it.
And now began that strange period known by the name of the Reign of
Terror. The Jacobins had prevailed. This was their hour, and the power
of darkness. The Convention was subjugated and reduced to profound
silence on the highest questions of state. The sovereignty passed to the
Committee of Public Safety. To the edicts framed by that Committee the
representative assembly did not venture to offer even the species of
opposition which the ancient parliament had frequently offered to the
mandates of the ancient kings. Six persons held the chief power in the
small cabinet which now domineered over France--Robespierre, St. Just,
Couthon, Collot, Billaud, and Barère. {476}To some of these men, and of
those who adhered to them, it is due to say that the fanaticism which
had emancipated them from the restraints of justice and compassion had
emancipated them also from the dominion of vulgar cupidity and of vulgar
fear; that, while hardly knowing where to find an assignat of a few
francs to pay for a dinner, they expended with strict integrity the
immense revenue which they collected by every art of rapine; and that
they were ready, in support of their cause, to mount the scaffold with
as much indifference as they showed when they signed the death-warrants
of aristocrats and priests. But no great party can be composed of such
materials as these. It is the inevitable law that such zealots as we
have described shall collect around them a multitude of slaves,
of cowards, and of libertines, whose savage tempers and licentious
appetites, withheld only by the dread of law and magistracy from the
worst excesses, are called into full activity by the hope of impunity. A
faction which, from whatever motive, relaxes the great laws of morality,
is certain to be joined by the most immoral part of the community.
This has been repeatedly proved in religious wars. The war of the Holy
Sepulchre, the Albigensian war, the Huguenot war, the Thirty Years’ war,
all originated in pious zeal. That zeal inflamed the champions of
the church to such a point that they regarded all generosity to the
vanquished as a sinful weakness. The infidel, the heretic, was to be run
down like a mad dog. No outrage committed by the Catholic warrior on the
miscreant enemy could deserve punishment. As soon as it was known
that boundless license was thus given to barbarity and dissoluteness,
thousands of wretches who cared nothing for the sacred cause, but who
were eager to be exempted from the {477}police of peaceful cities, and
the discipline of well-governed camps, flocked to the standard of the
faith. The men who had set up that standard were sincere-, chaste,
regardless of lucre, and, perhaps, where only themselves were concerned,
not unforgiving: but round that standard were assembled such gangs of
rogues, ravishers, plunderers, and ferocious bravoes, as were scarcely
ever found under the flag of any state engaged in a mere temporal
quarrel. In a very similar way was the Jacobin party composed. There was
a small nucleus of enthusiasts; round that nucleus was gathered a vast
mass of ignoble depravity; and in all that mass there was nothing so
depraved and so ignoble as Barère.
Then came those days when the most barbarous of all codes was
administered by the most barbarous of all tribunals; when no man could
greet his neighbours, or say his prayers, or dress his hair, without
danger of committing a capital crime; when spies lurked in every corner;
when the guillotine was long and hard at work every morning; when the
jails were filled as close as the hold of a slave-ship; when the
gutters ran foaming with blood into the Seine; when it was death to be
great-niece of a captain of the royal guards, or halfbrother of a doctor
of the Sorbonne, to express a doubt whether assignats would not fall, to
hint that the English had been victorious in the action of the first of
June, to have a copy of one of Burke’s pamphlets locked up in a desk,
to laugh at a Jacobin for taking the name of Cassius or Timoleon, or
to call the Fifth Sans-culottide by its old superstitious name of St.
Matthew’s Day. While the daily waggon-loads of victims were carried
to their doom through the streets of Paris, the Proconsuls whom the
sovereign Committee had sent forth to the departments revelled in an
extravagance of {478}cruelty unknown even in the capital. The knife of
the deadly machine rose and fell too slow for their work of slaughter.
Long rows of captives were mowed down with grape shot. Holes were made
in the bottom of crowded barges. Lyons was turned into a desert.
At Arras even the cruel mercy of a speedy death was denied to the
prisoners. All down the Loire, from Sauur to the sea, great flocks of
crows and kites feasted on naked corpses, twined together in hideous
embraces. No mercy was shown to sex or age. The number of young lads and
of girls of seventeen who were murdered by that execrable government is
to be reckoned by hundreds. Babies torn from the breast were tossed from
pike to pike along the Jacobin ranks. One champion of liberty had his
pockets well stuffed with ears. Another swaggered about with the finger
of a little child in his hat. A few months had sufficed to degrade
France below the level of New Zealand.
It is absurd to say that any amount of public danger can justify a
system like this, we do not say on Christian principles, we do not
say on the principles of a high morality, but even on principles
of Machiavellian policy. It is true that great emergencies call for
activity and vigilance; it is true that they justify severity which, in
ordinary times, would deserve the name of cruelty. But indiscriminate
severity can never, under any circumstances, be useful. It is plain
that the whole efficacy of punishment depends on the care with which the
guilty are distinguished. Punishment which strikes the guilty and the
innocent promiscuously operates merely like a pestilence or a great
convulsion of nature, and has no more tendency to prevent offences
than the cholera, or an earthquake like that of Lisbon, would have. The
energy for which the Jacobin administration {479}is praised was merely
the energy of the Malay who maddens himself with opium, draws his knife,
and runs a-muck through the streets, slashing right and left at friends
and foes. Such has never been the energy of truly great rulers; of
Elizabeth, for example, of Oliver, or of Frederick. They were not,
indeed, scrupulous. But, had they been less scrupulous than they were,
the strength and amplitude of their minds would have preserved them
from crimes such as those which the small men of the Committee of Public
Safety took for daring strokes of policy. The great Queen who so long
held her own against foreign and domestic enemies, against temporal and
spiritual arms; the great Protector who governed with more than regal
power, in despite both of royalists and republicans; the great King
who, with a beaten army and an exhausted treasury, defended his little
dominions to the last against the united efforts of Russia, Austria and
France; with what scorn would they have heard that it was impossible for
them to strike a salutary terror into the disaffected without sending
school-boys and school-girls to death by cart-loads and boat-loads!
The popular notion is, we believe, that the leading Terrorists were
wicked men, but, at the same time, great men. We can see nothing great
about them but their wickedness. That their policy was daringly original
is a vulgar error. Their policy is as old as the oldest accounts which
we have of human misgovernment. It seemed new in France and in the
eighteenth century only because it had been long disused, for excellent
reasons, by the enlightened part of mankind. But it has always
prevailed, and still prevails, in savage and half savage nations, and
is the chief cause which prevents such nations from making advances
{480}towards civilisation. Thousands of deys, of beys, of pachas, of
rajahs, of nabobs, have shown themselves as great masters of statecraft
as the members of the Committee of Public Safety. Djezzar, we imagine,
was superior to any of them in their new line. In fact, there is not
a petty tyrant in Asia or Africa so dull or so unlearned as not to be
fully qualified for the business of Jacobin police and Jacobin finance.
To behead people by scores without caring whether they are guilty or
innocent; to wring money out of the rich by the help of jailers and
executioners; to rob the public creditor, and to put him to death if
he remonstrates; to take loaves by force out of the bakers’ shops; to
clothe and mount soldiers by seizing on one man’s wool and linen, and on
another man’s horses and saddles, without compensation; is of all
modes of governing the simplest and most obvious. Of its morality we at
present say nothing. But surely it requires no capacity beyond that of
a barbarian or a child. By means like those which we have described, the
Committee of Public Safety undoubtedly succeeded, for a short time,
in enforcing profound submission, and in raising immense funds. But to
enforce submission by butchery, and to raise funds by spoliation, is not
statesmanship. The real statesman is he who, in trembled times, keeps
down the turbulent without unnecessarily harassing the well-affected;
and who, when great pecuniary resources are needed, provides for the
public exigencies without violating the security of property and drying
up the sources of future prosperity. Such a statesman, we are confident,
might, in 1793, have preserved the independence of France without
shedding a drop of innocent blood, without plundering a single
warehouse. Unhappily, the Republic was {481}subject to men who were mere
demagogues and in no sense statesmen. They could declaim at a club. They
could lead a rabble to mischief. But they had no skill to conduct the
affairs of an empire. The want of skill they supplied for a time by
atrocity and blind violence. For legislative ability, fiscal ability,
military ability, diplomatic ability, they had one substitute, the
guillotine. Indeed their exceeding ignorance, and the barrenness of
their invention, are the best excuse for their murders and robberies. We
really believe that they would not have cut so many throats, and picked
so many pockets, if they had known how to govern in any other way.
That under their administration the war against the European Coalition
was successfully conducted is true. But that war had been successfully
conducted before their elevation, and continued to be successfully
conducted after their fall. Terror was not the order of the day when
Brussels opened its gates to Dumourier. Terror had ceased to be the
order of the day when Piedmont and Lombardy were conquered by Bonaparte.
The truth is, that France was saved, not by the Committee of Public
Safety, but by the energy, patriotism, and valour of the French people.
Those high qualities were victorious in spite of the incapacity of
rulers whose administration was a tissue, not merely of crimes, but of
blunders.
We have not time to tell how the leaders of the savage faction at length
began to avenge mankind on each other; hoe the craven Hébert was dragged
wailing and trembling to his doom; how the nobler Danton, moved by a
late repentance, strove in vain to repair the evil which he had
wrought, and half redeemed the great {482}crime of September by manfully
encountering death in the cause of mercy.
Our business is with Barère. 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. Barère first proclaimed from the tribune of the
Convention that terror must be the order of the day. It was by Barère
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 Barère 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 Barère 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 Barère 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 {483}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 Cæsars, Barère 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 Barère was the loudest in opposition to
their prayer. When the crimes of Lebon, one of the worst, if not the
very worst, of the vicegerents 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,
Barère 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
{484}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 Barère,
“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 Barère. 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.