Lectures on the French Revolution

When Robespierre declared that the Convention never intended to proscribe the Catholic worship, he was sincere, and was taking the first step that led to the feast of the Supreme Being. Danton acted from policy only, in opposition to men who were his own enemies. Chaumette and Hébert succumbed. The Commune proclaimed that the churches were not to be closed; and early in December the worship of Reason, having lasted twenty-six days, came to an end. The wound was keenly felt. Fire and poison, said Chaumette, were the weapons with which the priests attack the nation. For such traitors, there must be no mercy. It is a question of life and death. Let us throw up between us the barrier of eternity. The Mass was no longer said in public. It continued in private chapels throughout the winter until the end of February. In April, one head of accusation against Chaumette was his interference with midnight service at Christmas.

Robespierre had repressed Hébertism with the aid of Danton. The visible sign of their understanding was the appearance in December of the Vieux Cordelier. In this famous journal Camille Desmoulins pleaded the cause of mercy with a fervour which, at first, resembled sincerity, and pilloried Hébert as a creature that got drunk on the drippings of the guillotine, Robespierre saw the earlier numbers in proof; but by Christmas he had enough of the bargain. The Convention, having shown some inclination towards clemency on December 20, withdrew from it on the 26th, and Desmoulins, in the last of his six numbers, loudly retracted his former argument. The alliance was dissolved. It had served the purpose of Robespierre, by defeating Hébert, and discrediting Danton. In January, the Vieux Cordelier ceased to appear.

Robespierre now stood between the two hostile parties – Danton, Desmoulins, and their friends, on the side of a regular government; Hébert, Chaumette, and Collot, returned from a terrible proconsulate, wishing to govern by severities. The energy of Collot gave new life to his party, whilst Danton displayed no resource. Just then, Robespierre was taken ill, and from February 19 to March 13 he was confined to his room. Robespierre was a calculator and a tactician, methodical in his ways, definite and measured in his ends. He was less remarkable for determination and courage; and thus two men of uncommon energy now took the lead. They were Billaud-Varennes and St. Just. When St. Just was with the army, his companion Baudot relates that they astonished the soldiers by their intrepidity under fire. He adds that they had no merit, for they knew that they bore charmed lives, and that cannon balls could not touch them. That was the ardent and fanatical spirit that St. Just brought back with him. During his leader's illness he acquired the initiative, and proclaimed the doctrine that all factions constitute a division of power, that they weaken the state, and are therefore treasonable combinations.

On March 4, Hébert called the people to arms against the government of Moderates. The attempt failed, and Robespierre, by a large expenditure of money, had Paris on his side. At one moment he even thought of making terms with this dangerous rival; and there is a story that he lost heart, and meditated flight to America. In this particular crisis money played a part, and Hébert was financed by foreign bankers, to finish the tyranny of Robespierre. On March 13 he was arrested, Chaumette on the 18th; and on the 17th, Hérault de Séchelles, Danton's friend, on coming to the Committee of Public Safety, was told by Robespierre to retire, as they were deliberating on his arrest. On the 19th the Dantonists caused the arrest of Héron, the police agent of Robespierre, who instantly had him released. March 24, Hébert was sent to the scaffold. On the way he lamented to Ronsin that the Republic was about to perish. "The Republic," said the other, "is immortal." Hitherto the guillotine had been used to destroy the vanquished parties, and persons notoriously hostile. It was an easy inference, that it might serve against personal rivals, who were the best of Republicans and Jacobins. The victims in the month of March were 127.

Danton did nothing to arrest the slaughter. His inaction ruined him, and deprived him of that portion of sympathy which is due to a man who suffers for his good intentions. Billaud and St. Just demanded that he should be arrested, and carried it, at a night sitting of the Committee. Only one refused to sign. Danton had been repeatedly and amply warned. Thibaudeau, Rousselin, had told him what was impending. Panis, at the last moment, came to him at the opera, and offered him a place of refuge. Westermann proposed to him to rouse the armed people. Tallien entreated him to take measures of defence; and Tallien was president of the Convention. A warning reached him from the very grave of Marat. Albertine came to him and told him that her brother had always spoken with scorn of Robespierre as a man of words. She exclaimed, "Go to the tribune while Tallien presides, carry the Assembly, and crush the Committees. There is no other road to safety for a man like you!" "What?" he replied; "I am to kill Robespierre and Billaud?" "If you do not, they will kill you." He said to one of his advisers, "The tribunal would absolve me." To another, "Better to be guillotined than to guillotine." And to a third, "They will never dare!" In a last interview, Robespierre accused him of having encouraged the opposition of Desmoulins, and of having regretted the Girondins. "Yes," said Danton, "it is time to stop the shedding of blood." "Then," returned the other, "you are a conspirator, and you own it." Danton, knowing that he was lost, burst into tears. All Europe would cast him out; and, as he had said, he was not a man who could carry his country in the soles of his shoes. One formidable imputation was to call him a bondsman of Mr. Pitt; for Pitt had said that if there were negotiations, the best man to treat with would be Danton. He was arrested, with Camille Desmoulins and other friends, on the night of March 31. Legendre moved next day that he be heard before the Convention, and if they had heard him, he would still have been master there. Robespierre felt all the peril of the moment, and the Right supported him in denying the privilege. Danton defended himself with such force that the judges lost their heads, and the tones of the remembered voice were heard outside, and agitated the crowd. The Committee of Public Safety refused the witnesses called for the defence, and cut short the proceedings. The law was broken that Danton and his associates might be condemned.

There was not in France a more thorough patriot than Danton; and all men could see that he had been put to death out of personal spite, and jealousy, and fear. There was no way, thenceforth, for the victor to maintain his power, but the quickening of the guillotine. Reserving compassion for less ignoble culprits, we must acknowledge that the defence of Danton is in the four months of increasing terror that succeeded the 5th of April 1794, when Robespierre took his stand at the corner of the Tuileries to watch the last moments of his partner in crime.

The sudden decline of Danton, and his ruin by the hands of men evidently inferior to him in capacity and vigour, is so strange an event that it has been explained by a story which is worth telling, though it is not authenticated enough to influence the narrative. In June 1793, just after the fall of the Girondins, Danton was married. His bride insisted that their union should be blessed by a priest who had not taken the oaths. Danton agreed, found the priest, and went to confession. He became unfitted for his part in the Revolution, dropped out of the Committees, and retired, discouraged and disgusted, into the country. When he came back, after the execution of the queen, of Madame Roland, and the Girondins, he took the side of the proscribed clergy, and encouraged the movement in favour of clemency. In this way he lost his popularity and influence, and refused to adopt the means of recovering power. He neglected even to take measures for his personal safety, like a man who was sick of his life. At that time, seven of the priests of Paris, whose names are given, took it by turns to follow the carts from the prison to the guillotine, disguised as one of the howling mob, for the comfort and consolation of the dying. And the abbé de Keravenant, who had married Danton, thus followed him to the scaffold, was recognised by him, and absolved him at the last moment.

XIX

ROBESPIERRE

We reach the end of the Reign of Terror, on the 9th of Thermidor, the most auspicious date in modern history. In April Robespierre was absolute. He had sent Hébert to death because he promoted disorder, Chaumette because he suppressed religion, Danton because he had sought to restrain bloodshed. His policy was to keep order and authority by regulated terror, and to relax persecution. The governing power was concentrated in the Committee of Public Safety by abolishing the office of minister, instead of which there were twelve Boards of Administration reporting to the Committee. That there might be no rival power, the municipality was remodelled and placed in the hands of men attached to Robespierre. The dualism remained between representation in the Assembly and the more direct action of the sovereign people in the Town Hall. When the tocsin rings, said a member of the Commune, the Convention ceases to exist. In other words, when the principal chooses to interfere, he supersedes his agent. The two notions of government are contradictory, and the bodies that incorporated them were naturally hostile. But their antagonism was suspended while Robespierre stood between.

The reformed Commune at once closed all clubs that were not Jacobin. All parties had been crushed: Royalists, Feuillants, Girondins, Cordeliers. What remained of them in the scattered prisons of France was now to be forwarded to Paris, and there gradually disposed of. But though there no longer existed an opposing party, there was still a class of men that had not been reduced or reconciled. This consisted chiefly of deputies who had been sent out to suppress the rising of the provinces in 1793. These Commissaries of the Convention had enjoyed the exercise of enormous authority; they had the uncontrolled power of life and death, and they had gathered spoil without scruple, from the living and the dead. On that account they were objects of suspicion to the austere personage at the head of the State; and they were known to be the most unscrupulous and the most determined of men.

Robespierre, who was nervously apprehensive, saw very early where the danger lay, and he knew which of these enemies there was most cause to dread. He never made up his mind how to meet the peril; he threatened before he struck; and the others combined and overthrew him. He had helped to unite them by introducing a conflict of ideas at a time when, apparently, and on the surface, there was none. Everybody was a Republican and a Jacobin, but Robespierre now insisted on the belief in God. He perished by the monstrous imposture of associating divine sanction with the crimes of his sanguinary reign. The scheme was not suggested by expediency, for he had been always true to the idea. In early life he had met Rousseau at Ermenonville, and he had adopted the indeterminate religion of the "vicaire Savoyard." In March 1792 he proposed a resolution, that the belief in Providence and a future life is a necessary condition of Jacobinism. In November, he argued that the decline of religious conviction left only a residue of ideas favourable to liberty and public virtue, and that the essential principles of politics might be found in the sublime teaching of Christ. He objected to disendowment, because it is necessary to keep up reverence for an authority superior to man. Therefore, on December 5, he induced the Club to break in pieces the bust of Helvétius.

Although Rousseau, the great master, had been a Genevese Calvinist, nobody thought of preserving Christianity in a Protestant form. The Huguenot ministers themselves did nothing for it, and Robespierre had a peculiar dislike of them. Immediately after the execution of Danton and before the trial of Chaumette, the restoration of religion was foreshadowed by Couthon. A week later it was resolved that the remains of Rousseau, the father of the new church, should be transferred to the Pantheon.

On May 7, Robespierre brought forward his famous motion that the Convention acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being. His argument, stripped of parliamentary trappings, was this. The secret of the life of a Republic is public and private virtue, that is, integrity, the consciousness of duty, the spirit of self-sacrifice, submission to the discipline of authority. These are the natural conditions of pure democracy; but in an advanced stage of civilisation they are difficult to maintain without the restraint of belief in God, in eternal life, in government by Providence. Society will be divided by passion and interest, unless it is reconciled and controlled by that which is the universal foundation of religions. By this appeal to a higher power Robespierre hoped to strengthen the State at home and abroad. In the latter purpose he succeeded; and the solemn renunciation of atheism impressed the world. It was very distinctly a step in the Conservative direction, for it promised religious liberty. There was to be no favour to churches, but also no persecution. Practically, the advantage was for the Christian part of the population, and irreligion, though not proscribed, was discouraged. The Revolution appeared to be turning backwards, and to seek its friends among those who had acquired their habits of life and thought under the fallen order. The change was undoubted; and it was a change imposed by the will of one man, unsupported by any current of opinion.

A month later, June 8, the Feast of the Supreme Being was held with all the solemnity of which Paris was capable. Robespierre walked in procession from the Tuileries to the Champ de Mars, at the head of the Convention. As the others fell back, he marched alone with his hair powdered, a large nosegay in his hands, wearing the sky-blue coat and nankeens by which he is remembered, for they reappeared in the crisis of Thermidor. He had attained the loftiest summit of prosperity and greatness that was ever given to man. Not a monarch in Europe could compare with him in power. All that had stood in his way during the last five years had been swept to destruction; all that survived of the Revolution followed obedient at his heels. At the last election of a President in the Convention there had been 117 votes; but 485 had voted for Robespierre, that he might parade at their head that day. It was there, in that supreme and intoxicating moment, that a gulf opened before him, and he became aware of the extremity of his peril. For he could hear the hostile deputies in the front rank behind him, muttering curses and sneering at the enthusiasm with which he was received. Those fierce proconsuls who, at Lyons, Nevers, Nantes, Toulon, had crushed all that they were now forced to venerate by their master, vowed vengeance for their humiliation. They said that this was to be a starting-point for divine right, and the excuse for a new persecution. They felt that they were forging a weapon against themselves, and committing an act of suicide. The decree of the month before would have involved no such dire consequences; but the elaborate and aggressive ceremonial was felt as a declaration of war.

Experienced observers at once predicted that Robespierre would not last long. He lost no time in devising a precaution equal to the danger. He prepared what is known as the law of the 22nd of Prairial, which was presented by Couthon, and carried without a division on June 10, two days after the procession. It is the most tyrannical of all the acts of the Revolution, and is not surpassed by anything in the records of absolute monarchy. For the decree of Prairial suppressed the formalities of law in political trials. It was said by Couthon, that delays may be useful where only private interests are at stake, but there must be none where the interest of the entire public is to be vindicated. The public enemy has only to be identified. The State despatches him to save itself. Therefore the Committee was empowered to send whom it chose before the tribunal, and if the jury was satisfied, no time was to be lost with witnesses, written depositions, or arguments. Nobody whom Robespierre selected for execution would be allowed to delay judgment by defence; and that there might be no exception or immunity from arbitrary arrest and immediate sentence, all previous decrees in matter of procedure were revoked. That article contained the whole point, for it deprived the Convention of jurisdiction for the protection of its own members. Robespierre had only to send a deputy's name to the public accuser, and he would be in his grave next day. The point had been so well concealed that nobody perceived it. Afterwards, the deputies, warned by the great jurist Merlin, saw what they had done, and on June 11, they stipulated that no member should be arrested without leave of the Convention. Couthon and Robespierre were not present. On the 12th, by threatening that the Committees would resign, they caused the decree of the previous day to be rescinded, but they assured the Assembly that it was superfluous, and their design had been misunderstood. They maintained their text, and gained their object; but the success was on the other side. The scheme had been exposed, and the Convention had resisted, for the first time. The opposing deputies had received warning, and showed that they understood. From that moment they were on the watch, and their enemy shrank from employing against them a clause the validity of which he had denied. He gave them time to combine. Over the rest of the nation he exerted his new power without control. The victims increased rapidly in number. Down to the middle of June, in fourteen months, the executions had been about 1200. In seven weeks, after the law of Prairial, they were 1376; that is, an average of 32 in a week rose to an average of 196. But the guillotine was removed to a distant part of the city, where a deep trench was dug to carry away such quantities of blood.

During this time the Tribunal was not acting against men actually in public life, and we are not compelled to study its judgments, as if they were making history. Whilst inoffensive people were suffering obscurely, the enemies of the tyrant were plotting to save themselves from the dreadful fate they saw so near them. Nothing bound them together but fear and a common hatred for the obtrusive dogmatist at the head of affairs; and it was not evident to each that they were acting in the same cause. But there was a man among them, still somewhat in the background, but gifted with an incredible dexterity, who hurled Napoleon from power in 1815 and Robespierre in 1794.

Fouché, formerly an Oratorian, had been one of the most unscrupulous deputies on missions, and had given the example of seizing the treasure of churches. For he said there were no laws, and they had gone back to the state of nature. After the execution of Hébert he was recalled from Lyons; and Robespierre, whose sister he had asked in marriage, defended him at the Jacobins on April 10. Being an unfrocked ecclesiastic, he was elected president of the Club on June 6, as a protest against the clerical tendencies of Robespierre. On the 11th, immediately after the procession, and the law of Prairial, Fouché attacked him in a speech in which he said that it is to do homage to the Supreme Being to plunge a sword into the heart of a man who oppresses liberty. This was the first opening of hostilities, and it seems to have been premature. Fouché was not supported by the club at the time, and some weeks later, when Robespierre called him the head of the conspiracy against him, he was expelled. He was a doomed man, carrying his life in his hand, and he adopted more subtle means of combat. July 19, five days after his expulsion, Collot was elected President of the Convention. He and Fouché were united in sacred bands of friendship, for they had put 1682 persons to death at Lyons. About the same day others joined the plotters, and on July 20, Barère, the orator of the Committee, who watched the turning of the tide, made an ambiguous declaration portending a breach. No plan of operations had been agreed upon, and there was yet time for Robespierre, now fully awake to the approaching danger, to strike an irresistible blow.

During the last few weeks the position of the country had undergone a change. On the 1st of June, Villaret Joyeuse had given battle to the English off Ushant. It was the beginning of that long series of fights at sea, in which the French were so often successful in single combat, and so often defeated in general actions. They lost the day, but not the object for which they fought, as the supplies of American grain were brought safely into port. That substantial success and the opportune legend of the Vengeur saved the government from reproach. At the end of the month St. Just brought news of the French victory over the Austrians at Fleurus, the scene of so many battles. It was due to Jourdan and his officers, and would have been lost if they had obeyed St. Just; but he arrived in time to tell his own story. Many years were to pass before an enemy's guns were again heard on the Belgian frontier. St. Just entreated his colleague to seize the opportunity, and to destroy his enemies while the people were rejoicing over victory. It appeared, afterwards, that the battle of Fleurus, the greatest which the French had won since the reign of Lewis XIV., rendered no service to the government under whom it was fought. The soil of France was safe for twenty years, and with the terror of invasion, the need for terror at home passed away. It had been borne while the danger lasted; and with the danger, it came to an end.

The Committee of Public Safety resented the law of Prairial; and when asked to authorise the proscription of deputies refused. Robespierre did nothing to conciliate the members, and had not the majority. And he threatened and insulted Carnot. As the powers were then constituted he was helpless against his adversaries. The Commune and the Jacobins were true to him; but the Convention was on its guard, and the two Committees were divided. Lists of proscription had been discovered, and those who knew that their names were upon them made no surrender.

Two days after the speech which showed that Barère was wavering, when Collot had been chosen President, and Fouché was at work underground, a joint sitting of both Committees was called at night. St. Just proposed that there should be a dictator. Robespierre was ready to accept, but there were only five votes in favour – three out of eleven on one Committee, two out of twelve on the other. The Jacobins sent a deputation to require that the Convention should strengthen the executive; it was dismissed with words by Barère. One resource remained. It might still be possible, disregarding the false move of Prairial, to obtain the authority of the Convention for the arrest, that is, for the trial and execution of some of its members. They had delivered up Danton and Desmoulins, Hérault and Chaumette. They would perhaps abandon Cambon or Fouché, Bourdon or Tallien, four months later.

The Committees had refused Robespierre, and were in open revolt against his will. His opponents there would oppose him in the Assembly. But the mass of the deputies, belonging not to the Mountain but to the Plain, were always on his side. They had no immediate cause for fear, and they had something to hope for. Seventy of their number had been under arrest ever since October, as being implicated in the fall of the Girondins. Robespierre had constantly refused to let them be sent to trial, and they owed him their lives. They were still in prison, still in his power. To save them, their friends in the Assembly were bound to refuse nothing that he asked for. They would not scruple to deliver over to him a few more ruffians as they had delivered over the others in the spring. That was the basis of his calculation. The Mountain would be divided; the honest men of the Plain would give him the majority, and would purge the earth of another hatch of miscreants. On his last night at home he said to the friends with whom he lived, "We have nothing to fear, the Plain is with us."