Lectures on the French Revolution

Whilst Robespierre, repulsed by the committees which had so long obeyed him, sat down to compose the speech on which his victory and his existence depended, his enemies were maturing their plans. Fouché informed his sister at Nantes of what was in preparation. On the 21st of July he is expecting that they will triumph immediately. On the 23rd he writes: "Only a few days more, and honest men will have their turn. – Perhaps this very day the traitors will be unmasked." It is unlike so sagacious a man to have written these outspoken letters, for they were intercepted and sent to Paris for the information of Robespierre. But it shows how accurately Fouché timed his calculation, that when they arrived Robespierre was dead.

The importance of the neutral men of the Plain was as obvious to one side as to the other, and the Confederates attempted to negotiate with them. Their overtures were rejected; and when they were renewed, they were rejected a second time. The Plain were disabled by consideration for their friends, hostages in the grasp of Robespierre, and by the prospect of advantage for religion from his recent policy. They loaded him with adulation, and said that when he marched in the procession, with his blue coat and nosegay, he reminded them of Orpheus. They even thought it desirable that he should live to clear off a few more of the most detestable men in France, the very men who were making advances to them. They believed that time was on their side. Tallien, Collot, Fouché were baffled, and the rigid obstinacy of the Plain produced a moment of extreme and certain danger.

Whilst they hesitated, Tallien received a note in a remembered handwriting. That bit of paper saved unnumbered lives, and changed the fortune of France, for it contained these words: "Coward! I am to be tried to-morrow." At Bordeaux, Tallien had found a lady in prison, whose name was Madame de Fontenay, and who was the daughter of the Madrid banker Cabarrus. She was twenty-one, and people who saw her for the first time could not repress an exclamation of surprise at her extraordinary beauty. After her release, she divorced her husband, and married Tallien. In later years she became the Princesse de Chimay; but, for writing that note, she received the profane but unforgotten name of Notre Dame de Thermidor.

On the night of July 26, Tallien and his friends had a third Conference with Boissy d'Anglas and Durand de Maillane, and at last they gave way. But they made their terms. They gave their votes against Robespierre on condition that the Reign of Terror ended with him. There was no condition which the others would not have accepted in their extremity, and it is by that compact that the government of France, when it came into the hands of these men of blood, ceased to be sanguinary. It was high time, for, in the morning, Robespierre had delivered the accusing speech which he had been long preparing, and of which Daunou told Michelet that it was the only very fine speech he ever made. He spoke of heaven, and of immortality, and of public virtue; he spoke of himself; he denounced his enemies, naming scarcely any but Cambon and Fouché. He did not conclude with any indictment, or with any demand that the Assembly would give up its guilty members. His aim was to conciliate the Plain, and to obtain votes from the Mountain, by causing alarm but not despair. The next stroke was reserved for the morrow, when the Convention, by voting the distribution of his oration, should have committed itself too far to recede. The Convention at once voted that 250,000 copies of the speech should be printed, and that it should be sent to every parish in France. That was the form in which acceptance, entire and unreserved acceptance, was expressed. Robespierre thus obtained all that he demanded for the day. The Assembly would be unable to refuse the sacrifice of its black sheep, when he reappeared with their names.

Then it was seen that, in naming Cambon, the orator had made a mistake. For Cambon, having had the self-command to wait until the Convention had passed its approving vote, rose to reply. He repelled the attack which Robespierre had made upon him, and turned the entire current of opinion by saying, "What paralyses the Republic is the man who has just spoken."

There is no record of a finer act of fortitude in all parliamentary history. The example proved contagious. The Assembly recalled its vote, and referred the speech to the Committee. Robespierre sank upon his seat and murmured, "I am a lost man." He saw that the Plain could no longer be trusted. His attack was foiled. If the Convention refused the first step, they would not take the second, which he was to ask for next day. He went to the Jacobin Club, and repeated his speech to a crowded meeting. He told them that it was his dying testament. The combination of evil men was too strong for him. He had thrown away his buckler, and was ready for the hemlock. Collot sat on the step below the president's chair, close to him. He said, "Why did you desert the Committee? Why did you make your views known in public without informing us?" Robespierre bit his nails in silence. For he had not consulted the Committee because it had refused the extension of powers, and his action that day had been to appeal to the Convention against them. The Club, divided at first, went over to him, gave him an ovation, and expelled Collot and Billaud-Varennes with violence and contumely. Robespierre, encouraged by his success, exhorted the Jacobins to purify the Convention by expelling bad men, as they had expelled the Girondins. It was his first appeal to the popular forces. Coffinhal, who was a man of energy, implored him to strike at once. He went home to bed, after midnight, taking no further measures of precaution, and persuaded that he would recover the majority at the next sitting.

Collot and Billaud, both members of the supreme governing body, went to their place of meeting, after the stormy scene at the Club, and found St. Just writing intently. They fell upon him, and demanded to know whether he was preparing accusations against them. He answered that that was exactly the thing he was doing. When he had promised to submit his report to the Committee of Public Safety before he went to the Assembly, they let him go. In the morning, he sent word that he was too much hurt by their treatment of him to keep his promise. Barère meanwhile undertook to have a report ready against St. Just.

Before the Assembly began business on the morning of Sunday the 9th of Thermidor, Tallien was in the lobby cementing the alliance which secured the majority; and Bourdon came up and shook hands with Durand, saying, "Oh! the good men of the Right." When the sitting opened, St. Just at once mounted the tribune and began to read. Tallien, seeing him from outside, exclaimed, "Now is the moment, come and see. It is Robespierre's last day!" The report of St. Just was an attack on the committee. Tallien broke in, declaring that the absent men must be informed and summoned, before he could proceed. St. Just was not a ready speaker, and when he was defied and interrupted, he became silent. Robespierre endeavoured to bring him aid and encouragement; but Tallien would not be stopped, Billaud followed in the name of the government; Barère and Vadier continued, while Robespierre and St. Just insisted vainly on being heard. The interrupters were turbulent, aggressive, out of order, being desperate men fighting for life. Collot d'Herbois, the President, did not rebuke them, and having surrendered his place to a colleague whom he could trust, descended to take part in the fray. If the Convention was suffered once more to hear the dreaded voice of Robespierre, nobody could be sure that he would not recover his ascendency. These tactics succeeded. Both parties to the overnight convention were true to it, and Robespierre was not allowed to make his speech. The galleries had been filled from five in the morning. Barère moved to divide the command of Hanriot, the general of the Commune, on whose sword the triumvirs relied; and the Convention outlawed him and his second in command as the excitement increased. This was early in the afternoon; and it was on learning this that the Commune called out its forces, and Paris began to rise.

All this time Robespierre had not been personally attacked. Decrees were only demanded, and passed, against his inferior agents. The struggle had lasted for hours; he thought that his adversaries faltered, and made a violent effort to reach the tribune. It had become known in the Assembly that his friends were arming, and they began to cry, "Down with the tyrant!" The President rang his bell and refused to let him speak. At last his voice failed him. A Montagnard exclaimed, "He is choking with the blood of Danton." Robespierre replied, "What! It is Danton you would avenge?" And he said it in a way that signified "Then why did you not defend him?" When he understood what the Mountain meant, and that a motive long repressed had recovered force, he appealed to the Plain, to the honest men who had been so long silent, and so long submissive. They had voted both ways the day before, but he knew nothing of the memorable compact that was to arrest the guillotine. But the Plain, who were not prepared with articulate arguments for their change of front, were content with the unanswerable cry, "Down with the tyrant!" That was evidently decisive; and when that declaration had been evoked by his direct appeal the end came speedily. An unknown deputy moved that Robespierre be arrested, nobody spoke against it; and his brother and several friends were taken into custody with him. None made any resistance or protest. The conflict, they knew, would be outside. The Commune of Paris, the Jacobin Club, the revolutionary tribunal were of their party; and how many of the armed multitude, nobody could tell. All was not lost until that was known. At five o'clock the Convention, weary with a heavy day's work, adjourned for dinner.

The Commune had its opportunity, and began to gain ground. Their troops collected slowly, and Hanriot was arrested. He was released, and brought back in triumph to the Hôtel de Ville, where the arrested deputies soon assembled. They had been sent to different prisons, but all the gaolers but one refused to admit them. Robespierre insisted on being imprisoned, but the turnkey at the Luxembourg was unmoved, and turned him out. He dreaded to be forced into a position of illegality and revolt, because it would enable his enemies to outlaw him. Once outlawed, there was nothing left but an insurrection, of which the issue was uncertain. There was less risk in going before the revolutionary tribunal, where every official was his creature and nominee, and had no hope of mercy from his adversaries, when he ceased to protect. The gaoler who shut the prison door in his face sealed his fate; and it is supposed, but I do not know, that he had his instructions from Voulland, on the other side, in order that the prisoner might be driven into contumacy, against his will. Expelled from gaol, Robespierre still refused to be free, and went to the police office, where he was technically under arrest.

St. Just, who had seen war, and had made men wonder at his coolness under heavy fire, did not calculate with so much nicety, and repaired, with the younger Robespierre, to the municipality, where a force of some thousands of men were assembled. They sent to summon their leader, but the leader declined to come. He felt safer under arrest; but he advised his friends at the Commune to ring the tocsin, close the barriers, stop the Press, seize the post, and arrest the deputies. The position of the man of peace encouraging his comrades to break the law, and explaining how to do it, was too absurd to be borne. Coffinhal, who was a much bigger man, came and carried him away by friendly compulsion.

About ten o'clock the arrested deputies were united. Couthon, who was a cripple, had gone home. The others sent for him, and Robespierre signed a letter by which he was informed that the insurrection was in full activity. This message, and the advice which he forwarded from his shelter with the police prove that he had made up his mind to fight, and did not die a martyr to legality. But if Robespierre was ready, at the last extremity, to fight, he did not know how to do it. The favourable moment was allowed to slip by; not a gun was fired, and the Convention, after several hours of inaction and danger, began to recover power. By Voulland's advice the prisoners out of prison were outlawed, and Barras was put at the head of the faithful forces. Twelve deputies were appointed to proclaim the decrees all over Paris. Mounted on police chargers, conspicuous in their tricolor scarves, and lighted by torches, they made known in every street that Robespierre was now an outlaw under sentence of death. This was at last effective, and Barras was able to report that the people were coming over to the legal authority. An ingenious story was spread about that Robespierre had a seal with the lilies of France. The western and wealthier half of Paris was for the Convention but parts of the poorer quarters, north and east, went with the Commune. They made no fight. Legendre proceeded to the Jacobin Club, locked the door, and put the key in his pocket, while the members quietly dispersed. About one in the morning, Bourdon, at the head of the men from the district which had been the stronghold of Chaumette made his way along the river to the Place de Grève. The insurgents drawn up before the Hôtel de Ville made no resistance, and the leaders who were gathered within knew that all was over.

The collapse was instantaneous. A little earlier, a messenger sent out by Gaudin, afterwards Duke of Gaëta and Napoleon's trusted finance minister, reported that he had found Robespierre triumphing and receiving congratulations. Even in those last moments he shrank from action. A warlike proclamation was drawn up, signed by his friends, and laid before him. He refused to sign unless it was in the name of the French people. "Then," said Couthon, "there is nothing to be done but to die." Robespierre, doubtful and hesitating, wrote the first two letters of his name. The rest is a splash of blood. When Bourdon, with a pistol in each hand, and the blade of his sword between his teeth, mounted the stairs of the Hôtel de Ville at the head of his troops, Lebas drew two pistols, handed one to Robespierre, and killed himself with the other. What followed is one of the most disputed facts of history. I believe that Robespierre shot himself in the head, only shattering the jaw. Many excellent critics think that the wound was inflicted by a gendarme who followed Bourdon. His brother took off his shoes and tried to escape by the cornice outside, but fell on to the pavement. Hanriot, the general, hid himself in a sewer, from which he was dragged next morning in a filthy condition. The energetic Coffinhal alone got away, and remained some time in concealment. The rest were captured without trouble.

Robespierre was carried to the Tuileries and laid on a table where, for some hours, people came and stared at him. Surgeons attended to his wound, and he bore his sufferings with tranquillity. From the moment when the shot was fired he never spoke; but at the Conciergerie he asked, by signs, for writing materials. They were denied him, and he went to death taking his secret with him out of the world. For there has always been a mysterious suspicion that the tale has been but half told, and that there is something deeper than the base and hollow criminal on the surface. Napoleon liked him, and believed that he meant well. Cambacérès, the archchancellor of the Empire, who governed France when the Emperor took the field, said to him one day, "It is a cause that was decided but was never argued."

Some of those who felled the tyrant, such as Cambon and Barère, long after repented of their part in his fall. In the north of Europe, especially in Denmark, he had warm admirers. European society believed that he had affinity with it. It took him to be a man of authority, integrity, and order, an enemy of corruption and of war, who fell because he attempted to bar the progress of unbelief, which was the strongest current of the age. His private life was inoffensive and decent. He had been the equal of emperors and kings; an army of 700,000 men obeyed his word; he controlled millions of secret service money, and could have obtained what he liked for pardons, and he lived on a deputy's allowance of eighteen francs a day, leaving a fortune of less than twenty guineas in depreciated assignats. Admiring enemies assert that by legal confiscation, the division of properties, and the progressive taxation of wealth, he would have raised the revenue to twenty-two millions sterling, none of which would have been taken from the great body of small cultivators who would thus have been for ever bound to the Revolution. There is no doubt that he held fast to the doctrine of equality, which means government by the poor and payment by the rich. Also, he desired power, if it was only for self-preservation; and he held it by bloodshed, as Lewis XIV. had done, and Peter the Great, and Frederic. Indifference to the destruction of human life, even the delight at the sight of blood, was common all round him, and had appeared before the Revolution began. The transformation of society as he imagined, if it cost a few thousand heads in a twelvemonth, was less deadly than a single day of Napoleon fighting for no worthier motive than ambition. His private note-book has been printed, but it does not show what he thought of the future. That is the problem which the guillotine left unsolved on the evening of June 28, 1794. Only this is certain, that he remains the most hateful character in the forefront of history since Machiavelli reduced to a code the wickedness of public men.

XX

LA VENDÉE

The remorseless tyranny which came to an end in Thermidor was not the product of home causes. It was prepared by the defeat and defection of Dumouriez; it was developed by the loss of the frontier fortresses in the following July; and it fell when the tide of battle rolled away after the victory of Fleurus. We have, therefore, to consider the series of warlike transactions that reacted so terribly on the government of France. At first, and especially in the summer of 1793, the real danger was not foreign, but civil war. During four years the Revolution always had force on its side. The only active opposition had come from emigrant nobles who were a minority, acting for a class. Not a battalion had joined Brunswick when he occupied a French province; and the mass of the country people had been raised, under the new order, to a better condition than they had ever known. For the hard kernel of the revolutionary scheme, taken from agrarian Rome, was that those who till the land shall own the land; that they should enjoy the certainty of gathering the fruits of their toil for themselves; that every family should possess as much as it could cultivate. But the shock which now made the Republic tremble was an insurrection of peasants, men of the favoured class; and the democracy which was strong enough to meet the monarchies of Europe, saw its armies put to flight by a rabble of field labourers and woodmen, led by obscure commanders, of whom many had never served in war.

One of Washington's officers was a Frenchman who came out before Lafayette, and was known as Colonel Armand. His real name was the Marquis de La Rouerie. His stormy life had been rich in adventure and tribulation. He had appeared on the boards of the opera; he had gone about in company with a monkey; he had fought a duel, and believing that he had killed his man had swallowed poison; he had been an inmate of the monastery of La Trappe, after a temporary disappointment in love; and he had been sent to the Bastille with other discontented Bretons. On his voyage out his ship blew up in sight of land, and he swam ashore. But this man who came out of the sea was found to be full of audacity and resource. He rose to be a brigadier in the Continental army; and when he came home, he became the organiser of the royalist insurrection in the west. Authorised by the Princes, whom he visited at Coblenz, he prepared a secret association in Brittany, which was to co-operate with others in the central provinces.

While La Rouerie was adjusting his instruments and bringing the complicated agency to perfection, the invaders came and went, and the signal for action, when they were masters of Châlons, was never given. When volunteers were called out to resist them, men with black cockades went about interrupting the enrolment, and declaring that no man should take arms, except to deliver the king. Their mysterious leader, Cottereau, the first to bear the historic name of Jean Chouan, was La Rouerie's right hand. When the prospect of combination with the Powers was dissolved by Dumouriez, the character of the conspiracy changed, and men began to think that they could fight the Convention single-handed, while its armies were busy on the Rhine and Meuse. Brittany had 200 miles of coast, and as the Channel Islands were in sight, aid could come from British cruisers.

La Rouerie, who was a prodigy of inventiveness, and drew his lines with so firm a hand that the Chouannerie, which broke out after his death, lasted ten years and only went to pieces against Napoleon, organised a rising, almost from Seine to Loire, for the spring of 1793. Indeed it is not enough to say that they went down before the genius of Napoleon. The "Petite Chouannerie," as the rising of 1815 was called, contributed heavily to his downfall; for he was compelled to send 20,000 men against it, whose presence might have turned the fortune of the day at Waterloo.

But in January 1793 La Rouerie fell ill, the news of the king's death made him delirious, and on the 30th he died. That the explosion might yet take place at the appointed hour, they concealed his death, and buried him in a wood, at midnight, filling the grave with quicklime. The secret was betrayed, the remains were discovered, the accomplices fled, and those who were taken died faithful to their trust.

The Breton rising had failed for the time, and royalists north of the Loire had not recovered from the blow when La Vendée rose. The corpse in the thicket was found February 26; the papers were seized March 3; and it was March 12, at the moment when Brittany was paralysed, that the conscription gave the signal of civil war. The two things are quite separate. In one place there was a plot which came to nothing at the time; in the other, there was an outbreak which had not been prepared. La Vendée was not set in motion by the wires laid north of the Loire. It broke out spontaneously, under sudden provocation. But the Breton plot had ramified in that direction also, and there was much expectant watching for the hour of combined action. Smugglers, and poachers, and beggar men had carried the whispered parole, armed with a passport in these terms: "Trust the bearer, and give him aid, for the sake of Armand"; and certain remote and unknown country gentlemen were affiliated, whose names soon after filled the world with their renown. D'Elbée, the future commander-in-chief, was one of them; and he always regarded the tumultuous outbreak of March, the result of no ripened design, as a fatal error. That is the reason why the gentry hung back at first, and were driven forward by the peasants. It seemed madness to fight the Convention without previous organisation for purposes of war, and without the support of the far larger population of Brittany, which had the command of the coast, and was in touch with the great maritime Power. Politics and religion had roused much discontent; but the first real act of rebellion was prompted by the new principle of compulsory service, proclaimed on February 23.

The region which was to be the scene of so much glory and so much sorrow lies chiefly between the left bank of the Loire and the sea, about 100 miles across, from Saumur to the Atlantic, and 50 or 60 from Nantes towards Poitiers. Into the country farther south, the Vendeans, who were weak in cavalry and had no trained gunners, never penetrated. The main struggle raged in a broken, wooded, and almost inaccessible district called the Bocage, where there were few towns and no good roads. That was the stronghold of the grand army, which included all that was best in Vendean virtue. Along the coast there was a region of fens, peopled by a coarser class of men, who had little intercourse with their inland comrades, and seldom acted with them. Their leader, Charette, the most active and daring of partisans, fought more for the rapture of fighting than for the sake of a cause. He kept open communication by sea, negotiated with England, and assured the Bourbons that, if one of them appeared, he would place him at the head of 200,000 men. He regarded the other commanders as subservient to the clergy, and saw as little of them as he could.