ceased to fear them. He was allpowerful 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 {526}class of Jacobins. Had Barère’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. Barère 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
dryly 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
utterly 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 Barère. 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 Barère a candidate for the senate was consequently dropped.
But the people of Argelès 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
{527}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. Barère, 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, Barère 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. Barère 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 Barère. 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, {528}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, Barère, 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, Barère’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; the vilest spy
is he who serves foreigners against the government of his native land.
From 1807 to 1811 Barère lived in obscurity, railing as bitterly as his
craven cowardice would permit against the Imperial administration,
and coming sometimes {529}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 monarchial 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. Barère requested a hearing,
a deep and indignant murmur ran round the benches. After the battle of
Waterloo, Barère 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. {530}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 Labourdonnave and M. Hyde de Neuville. We have always {531}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. Barère 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 1880. 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 Barère’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,
Barère continued Barère 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 Périer, M. De Broglie, M. Guizot, and M. Thiers,
in particular, are {532}honoured with his abuse; and the King himself is
held up to execration as a hypocritical tyrant. Nevertheless, Barère 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 any thing 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 St. 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 {533}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 tribunais 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 Dominies 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 the 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 {534}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 every thing but the real cause--their own immorality 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 Barère. From his own life, from his own pen, from his own month,
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 {535}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. Barère, 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 Barère’s aversion to
our {536}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 Cofhis. 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 200,000l. 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. Cofhis, had been an
immense benefit to mankind. {537}Ignorant, however, as Barère 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 Barère of 1794, or as the Barère 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 Dodington; and you are still far from having
Barère. 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 any
thing 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 honor of our country; but that little he
did strenuously and constantly. Renegade, traitor, slave, coward, liar,
slanderer, murderer, hack writer, {538}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 Barère; for, as we think that whatever brings dishonour on
religion is a serious evil, we had, we own, indulged a hope that Barère
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 Barère. 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 {539}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, Hébert 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 Barère 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.
END OF VOLUME V.