CRITICALMISCELLANIES

BY

JOHN MORLEY

VOL. I. Essay 1: Robespierre

LondonMACMILLAN AND CO. , LIMITEDNEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY1904

CONTENTS OF VOL. I. 

ROBESPIERRE. 

I. 

 PAGE

Introduction 1

Different views of Robespierre 4

His youthful history 5

An advocate at Arras 7

Acquaintance with Carnot 10

The summoning of the States-General 11

Prophecies of revolution 12

Reforming Ministers tried and dismissed 13

Financial state of France 14

Impotence of the Monarchy 17

The Constituent Assembly 19

Robespierre interprets the revolutionary movement rightly 21

The Sixth of October 1789 23

Alteration in Robespierre's position 25

Character of Louis XVI. 28

And of Marie Antoinette 29

The Constitution and Robespierre's mark upon it 34

Instability of the new arrangements 37

Importance of Jacobin ascendancy 41

The Legislative Assembly 42

Robespierre's power at the Jacobin Club 44

His oratory 45

The true secret of his popularity 48

Aggravation of the crisis in the spring of 1792 50

The Tenth of August 1792 52

Danton 53

Compared with Robespierre 55

Robespierre compared with Marat and with Sieyès 57

Character of the Terror 58

II. 

Fall of the Girondins indispensable 60

France in desperate peril 61

The Committee of Public Safety 65

At the Tuileries 67

The contending factions 70

Reproduced an older conflict of theories 72

Robespierre's attitude 73

The Hébertists 77

Chaumette and his fundamental error 80

Robespierre and the atheists 82

His bitterness towards Anacharsis Clootz 86

New turn of events (March 1794) 90

First breach in the Jacobin ranks: the Hébertists 90

Robespierre's abandonment of Danton 91

Second breach: the Dantonians (April 1794) 95

Another reminiscence of this date 97

Robespierre's relations to the Committees changed 98

The Feast of the Supreme Being 101

Its false philosophy 103

And political inanity 104

The Law of Prairial 106

Robespierre's motive in devising it 107

It produces the Great Terror 109

Robespierre's chagrin at its miscarriage 112

His responsibility not to be denied 112

 (1) Affair of Catherine Théot 113

 " Cécile Renault 114

 (2) Robespierre stimulated popular commissions 115

The drama of Thermidor: the combatants 117

Its conditions 118

The Eighth Thermidor 119

Inefficiency of Robespierre's speech 121

The Ninth Thermidor 123

Famous scene in the Convention 125

Robespierre a prisoner 127

Struggle between the Convention and the Commune 129

Death of Robespierre 131

Ultimate issue of the struggle between the Committeesand the Convention 132

ROBESPIERRE. 

I. 

A French writer has recently published a careful and interesting volumeon the famous events which ended in the overthrow of Robespierre and theclose of the Reign of Terror. [1] These events are known in the historiccalendar as the Revolution of Thermidor in the Year II. After the fallof the monarchy, the Convention decided that the year should begin withthe autumnal equinox, and that the enumeration should date from thebirth of the Republic. The Year I. Opens on September 22, 1792; the YearII. Opens on the same day of 1793. The month of Thermidor begins on July19. The memorable Ninth Thermidor therefore corresponds to July 27, 1794. This has commonly been taken as the date of the commencement of acounter-revolution, and in one sense it was so. Comte, however, andothers have preferred to fix the reaction at the execution of Danton(April 5, 1794), or Robespierre's official proclamation of Deism in theFestival of the Supreme Being (May 7, 1794). 

[Footnote 1: _La Révolution de Thermidor_. Par Ch. D'Héricault. Paris:Didier, 1876. ]

M. D'Héricault does not belong to the school of writers who treat thecourse of history as a great high road, following a firmly traced line, and set with plain and ineffaceable landmarks. The French Revolution hasnearly always been handled in this way, alike by those who think itfruitful in blessings, and by their adversaries, who pronounce it acurse inflicted by the wrath of Heaven. Historians have looked at theRevolution as a plain landsman looks at the sea. To the landsman theocean seems one huge immeasurable flood, obeying a simple law of ebb andflow, and offering to the navigator a single uniform force. Yet in truthwe know that the oceanic movement is the product of many forces; theseeming uniformity covers the energy of a hundred currents andcounter-currents; the sea-floor is not even nor the same, but is subjectto untold conditions of elevation and subsidence; the sea is not onemass, but many masses moving along definite lines of their own. It isthe same with the great tides of history. Wise men shrink from summingthem up in single propositions. That the French Revolution led to animmense augmentation of happiness, both for the French and for mankind, can only be denied by the Pope. That it secured its beneficent resultsuntempered by any mixture of evil, can only be maintained by men as madas Doctor Pangloss. The Greek poetess Corinna said to the youthfulPindar, when he had interwoven all the gods and goddesses in the Thebanmythology into a single hymn, that we should sow with the hand and notwith the sack. Corinna's monition to the singer is proper to theinterpreter of historical truth: he should cull with the hand, and notsweep in with the scythe. It is doubtless mere pedantry to abstain fromthe widest conception of the sum of a great movement. A clear, definite, and stable idea of the meaning in the history of human progress of suchvast groups of events as the Reformation or the Revolution, isindispensable for any one to whom history is a serious study of society. It is just as important, however, not to forget that they were reallygroups of events, and not in either case a single uniform movement. TheWorld-Epos is after all only a file of the morning paper in a state ofglorification. A sensible man learns, in everyday life, to abstain frompraising and blaming character by wholesale; he becomes content to sayof this trait that it is good, and of that act that it was bad. So inhistory, we become unwilling to join or to admire those who insist upontransferring their sentiment upon the whole to their judgment upon eachpart. We seek to be allowed to retain a decided opinion as to the finalvalue to mankind of a long series of transactions, and yet not to commitourselves to set the same estimate on each transaction in particular, still less on each person associated with it. Why shall we not prize thegeneral results of the Reformation, without being obliged to defend Johnof Leyden and the Munster Anabaptists?

M. D'Héricault's volume naturally suggests such reflections as these. Ofall the men of the Revolution, Robespierre has suffered most from theaudacious idolatry of some writers, and the splenetic impatience ofothers. M. Louis Blanc and M. Ernest Hamel talk of him as an angel or aprophet, and the Ninth Thermidor is a red day indeed in theirmartyrology. Michelet and M. D'Héricault treat him as a mixture ofCagliostro and Caligula, both a charlatan and a miscreant. We arereminded of the commencement of an address of the French Senate to thefirst Bonaparte: 'Sire, ' they began, 'the desire for perfection is oneof the worst maladies that can afflict the human mind. ' This boldaphorism touches one of the roots of the judgments we pass both upon menand events. It is because people so irrationally think fit to insistupon perfection, that Robespierre's admirers would fain deny that heever had a fault, and the tacit adoption of the same impracticablestandard makes it easier for Robespierre's wholesale detractors to denythat he had a single virtue or performed a single service. The point ofview is essentially unfit for history. The real subject of history isthe improvement of social arrangements, and no conspicuous actor inpublic affairs since the world began saw the true direction ofimprovement with an absolutely unerring eye from the beginning of hiscareer to the end. It is folly for the historian, as it is for thestatesman, to strain after the imaginative unity of the dramaticcreator. Social progress is an affair of many small pieces and slowaccretions, and the interest of historic study lies in tracing, amid theimmense turmoil of events and through the confusion of voices, thedevious course of the sacred torch, as it shifts from bearer to bearer. And it is not the bearers who are most interesting, but the torch. 

 * * * * *

In the old Flemish town of Arras, known in the diplomatic history of thefifteenth century by a couple of important treaties, and famous in theindustrial history of the Middle Ages for its pre-eminence in themanufacture of the most splendid kind of tapestry hangings, MaximilianRobespierre was born in May 1758. He was therefore no more than five andthirty years old when he came to his ghastly end in 1794. His father wasa lawyer, and, though the surname of the family had the prefix ofnobility, they belonged to the middle class. When this decorative prefixbecame dangerous, Maximilian Derobespierre dropped it. His great rival, Danton, was less prudent or less fortunate, and one of the charges madeagainst him was that he had styled himself Monsieur D'Anton. 

Robespierre's youth was embittered by sharp misfortune. His mother diedwhen he was only seven years old, and his father had so little courageunder the blow that he threw up his practice, deserted his children, anddied in purposeless wanderings through Germany. The burden that the weakand selfish throw down, must be taken up by the brave. Friendlykinsfolk charged themselves with the maintenance of the four orphans. Maximilian was sent to the school of the town, whence he proceeded witha sizarship to the college of Louis-le-Grand in Paris. He was an apt andstudious pupil, but austere, and disposed to that sombre cast of spiritswhich is common enough where a lad of some sensibility and muchself-esteem finds himself stamped with a badge of social inferiority. Robespierre's worshippers love to dwell on his fondness for birds: withthe universal passion of mankind for legends of the saints, they tellhow the untimely death of a favourite pigeon afflicted him with anguishso poignant, that, even sixty long years after, it made his sister'sheart ache to look back upon the pain of that tragic moment. Always asentimentalist, Robespierre was from boyhood a devout enthusiast for thegreat high priest of the sentimental tribe. Rousseau was then passingthe last squalid days of his life among the meadows and woods atErmenonville. Robespierre, who could not have been more than twenty atthe time, for Rousseau died in the summer of 1778, is said to have goneon a reverential pilgrimage in search of an oracle from the lonely sage, as Boswell and as Gibbon and a hundred others had gone before him. Rousseau was wont to use his real adorers as ill as he used hisimaginary enemies. Robespierre may well have shared the discouragementof the enthusiastic father who informed Rousseau that he was about tobring up his son on the principles of _Emilius_. 'Then so much theworse, ' cried the perverse philosopher, 'both for you and your son. ' Ifhe had been endowed with second sight, he would have thought at least asrude a presage due to this last and most ill-starred of a wholegeneration of neophytes. 

In 1781 Robespierre returned to Arras, and amid the welcome of hisrelatives and the good hopes of friends began the practice of anadvocate. For eight years he led an active and seemly life. He was notwholly pure from that indiscretion of the young appetite, about whichthe world is mute, but whose better ordering and governance would give adiviner brightness to the earth. Still, if he did not escape the ordealof youth, Robespierre was frugal, laborious, and persevering. Hisdomestic amiability made him the delight of his sister, and his zealousself-sacrifice for the education and advancement in life of his youngerbrother was afterwards repaid by Augustin Robespierre's devotion throughall the fierce and horrible hours of Thermidor. Though cold intemperament, extremely reserved in manners, and fond of industriousseclusion, Robespierre did not disdain the social diversions of thetown. He was a member of a reunion of Rosati, who sang madrigals andadmired one another's bad verses. Those who love the ironical surprisesof fate, may picture the young man who was doomed to play so terrible apart in terrible affairs, going through the harmless follies of aceremonial reception by the Rosati, taking three deep breaths over arose, solemnly fastening the emblem to his coat, emptying a glass ofrose-red wine at a draught to the good health of the company, andfinally reciting couplets that Voltaire would have found almost asdetestable as the Law of Prairial or the Festival of the Supreme Being. More laudable efforts of ambition were prize essays, in whichRobespierre has the merit of taking the right side in importantquestions. He protested against the inhumanity of laws that inflictedcivil infamy upon the innocent family of a convicted criminal. And heprotested against the still more horrid cruelty which reducedunfortunate children born out of wedlock to something like the status ofthe mediæval serf. Robespierre's compositions at this time do not riseabove the ordinary level of declaiming mediocrity, but they promised amanhood of benignity and enlightenment. To compose prize essays onpolitical reforms was better than to ignore or to oppose politicalreform. But the course of events afterwards owed their least desirablebias to the fact that such compositions were the nearest approach topolitical training that so many of the revolutionary leaders underwent. One is inclined to apply to practical politics Arthur Young's sensibleremark about the endeavour of the French to improve the quality of theirwool: 'A cultivator at the head of a sheep-farm of 3000 or 4000 acres, would in a few years do more for their wools than all the academiciansand philosophers will effect in ten centuries. '

In his profession he distinguished himself in one or two causes of localcelebrity. An innovating citizen had been ordered by the authorities toremove a lightning-conductor from his house within three days, as beinga mischievous practical paradox, as well as a danger and an annoyance tohis neighbours. Robespierre pleaded the innovator's case on appeal, andwon it. He defended a poor woman who had been wrongfully accused by amonk belonging to the powerful corporation of a great neighbouringabbey. The young advocate did not even shrink from manfully arguing acase against the august Bishop of Arras himself. His independence didhim no harm. The Bishop afterwards appointed him to the post of judge orlegal assessor in the episcopal court. This tribunal was a remnant ofwhat had once been the sovereign authority and jurisdiction of theBishops of Arras. That a court with the power of life and death shouldthus exist by the side of a proper corporation of civil magistrates, isan illustration of the inextricable labyrinth of the French law and itsadministration on the eve of the Revolution. Robespierre did not holdhis office long. Every one has heard the striking story, how the youngjudge, whose name was within half a dozen years to take a place in thepopular mind of France and of Europe with the bloodiest monsters of mythor history, resigned his post in a fit of remorse after condemning amurderer to be executed. 'He is a criminal, no doubt, ' Robespierre keptgroaning in reply to the consolations of his sister, for women are morepositive creatures than men: 'a criminal, no doubt; but to put a man todeath!' Many a man thus begins the great voyage with queasysensibilities, and ends it a cannibal. 

Among Robespierre's associates in the festive mummeries of the Rosatiwas a young officer of Engineers, who was destined to be his colleaguein the dread Committee of Public Safety, and to leave an important namein French history. In the garrison of Arras, Carnot was quartered, --thatiron head, whose genius for the administrative organisation of warachieved even greater things for the new republic than the genius ofLouvois had achieved for the old monarchy. Carnot surpassed not onlyLouvois, but perhaps all other names save one in modern militaryhistory, by uniting to the most powerful gifts for organisation, boththe strategic talent that planned the momentous campaign of 1794, andthe splendid personal energy and skill that prolonged the defence ofAntwerp against the allied army in 1814 Partisans dream of theunrivalled future of peace, glory, and freedom that would have fallen tothe lot of France, if only the gods had brought about a hearty unionbetween the military genius of Carnot and the political genius ofRobespierre. So, no doubt, after the restoration of Charles II. InEngland, there were good men who thought that all would have gone verydifferently, if only the genius of the great creator of the Ironsideshad taken counsel with the genius of Venner, the Fifth-Monarchy Man, andFeak, the Anabaptist prophet. 

The time was now come when such men as Robespierre were to be tried withfire, when they were to drink the cup of fury and the dregs of the cupof trembling. Sybils and prophets have already spoken their inexorabledecree, as Goethe has said, on the day that first gives the man to theworld; no time and no might can break the stamped mould of hischaracter; only as life wears on, do all its aforeshapen lines come intolight. He is launched into a sea of external conditions, that are asindependent of his own will as the temperament with which he confrontsthem. It is action that tries, and variation of circumstance. The leadenchains of use bind many an ugly unsuspected prisoner in the soul; andwhen the habit of their lives has been sundered, the most immaculate arecapable of antics beyond prevision. A great crisis of the world wasprepared for Robespierre and those others, his allies or his destroyers, who with him came like the lightning and went like the wind. 

At the end of 1788 the King of France found himself forced to summon theStates-General. It was their first assembly since 1614. On the memorableFourth of May, 1789, Robespierre appeared at Versailles as one of therepresentatives of the third estate of his native province of Artois. The excitement and enthusiasm of the elections to this renownedassembly, the immense demands and boundless expectations that theydisclosed, would have warned a cool observer of events, if in thatheated air a cool observer could have been found, that the hour hadstruck for the fulfilment of those grim apprehensions of revolution thathad risen in the minds of many shrewd men, good and bad, in the courseof the previous half century. No great event in history ever comeswholly unforeseen. The antecedent causes are so wide-reaching, many, andcontinuous, that their direction is always sure to strike the eye of oneor more observers in all its significance. Lewis the Fifteenth, whoseinvincible weariness and heavy disgust veiled a penetrating discernment, measured accurately the scope of the conflict between the crown and theparlements: but, said he, things as they are will last my time. Underthe roof of his own palace at Versailles, in the apartment of Madame dePompadour's famous physician, one of Quesnai's economic disciples hadcried out, 'The realm is in a sore way; it will never be cured without agreat internal commotion; but woe to those who have to do with it; intosuch work the French go with no slack hand. ' Rousseau, in a passage inthe Confessions, not only divines a speedy convulsion, but with strikingpractical sagacity enumerates the political and social causes that wereunavoidably drawing France to the edge of the abyss. Lord Chesterfield, so different a man from Rousseau, declared as early as 1752, that he sawin France every symptom that history had taught him to regard as theforerunner of deep change; before the end of the century, so hisprediction ran, both the trade of king and the trade of priest in Francewould be shorn of half their glory. D'Argenson in the same year declareda revolution inevitable, and with a curious precision of anticipationassured himself that if once the necessity arose of convoking theStates-General, they would not assemble in vain: _qu'on y prenne, garde!ils seraient fort sérieux!_ Oliver Goldsmith, idly wandering throughFrance, towards 1755, discerned in the mutinous attitude of the judicialcorporations, that the genius of freedom was entering the kingdom indisguise, and that a succession of three weak monarchs would end in theemancipation of the people of France. The most touching of all thesepresentiments is to be found in a private letter of the great Empress, the mother of Marie Antoinette herself. Maria Theresa describes theruined state of the French monarchy, and only prays that if it be doomedto ruin still more utter, at least the blame may not fall upon herdaughter. The Empress had not learnt that when the giants of socialforce are advancing from the sombre shadow of the past, with the thunderand the hurricane in their hands, our poor prayers are of no more availthan the unbodied visions of a dream. 

The old popular assembly of the realm was not resorted to before everymeans of dispensing with so drastic a remedy had been tried. Historianssometimes write as if Turgot were the only able and reforming ministerof the century. God forbid that we should put any other minister on alevel with that high and beneficent figure. But Turgot was not the firststatesman, both able and patriotic, who had been disgraced for want ofcompliance with the conditions of success at court; he was only the lastof a series. Chauvelin, a man of vigour and capacity, was dismissedwith ignominy in 1736. Machault, a reformer, at once courageous andwise, shared the same fate twenty years later; and in his caserevolution was as cruel and as heedless as reaction, for, at the age ofninety-one, the old man was dragged, blind and deaf, before therevolutionary tribunal and thence despatched to the guillotine. BetweenChauvelin and Machault, the elder D'Argenson, who was greater thaneither of them, had been raised to power, and then speedily hurled downfrom it (1747), for no better reason than that his manners were uncouth, and that he would not waste his time in frivolities that were as thebreath of life in the great gallery at Versailles and on thesmooth-shaven lawns of Fontainebleau. 

Not only had wise counsellors been tried; consultative assemblies hadbeen tried also. Necker had been dismissed in 1781, after publishing thememorable Report which first initiated the nation in the elements offinancial knowledge. The disorder waxed greater, and the monarchy drewnearer to bankruptcy each year. The only modern parallel to the state ofthings in France under Lewis the Sixteenth is to be sought in the stateof things in Egypt or in Turkey. Lewis the Fourteenth had left a debt ofbetween two and three thousand millions of livres, but this had beenwiped out by the heroic operations of Law; operations, by the way, whichhave never yet been scientifically criticised. But the debt soon grewagain, by foolish wars, by the prodigality of the court, and by therapacity of the nobles. It amounted in 1789 to something like twohundred and forty millions sterling; and it is interesting to noticethat this was exactly the sum of the public debt of Great Britain at thesame time. The year's excess of expenditure over receipts in 1774 wasabout fifty millions of livres: in 1787 it was one hundred and fortymillions, or according to a different computation even two hundredmillions. The material case was not at all desperate, if only the courthad been less infatuated, and the spirit of the privileged orders hadbeen less blind and less vile. The fatality of the situation lay in thecharacters of a handful of men and women. For France was abundant inresources, and even at this moment was far from unprosperous, in spiteof the incredible trammels of law and custom. An able financier, withthe support of a popular chamber and the assent of the sovereign, couldhave had no difficulty in restoring the public credit. But theconditions, simple as they might seem to a patriot or to posterity, wereunattainable so long as power remained with a caste that were anythingwe please except patriots. An Assembly of Notables was brought together, but it was only the empty phantasm of national representation. Yet thesituation was so serious that even this body, of arbitrary origin as itwas, still was willing to accept vital reforms. The privileged order, who were then as their descendants are now, the worst conservative partyin Europe, immediately persuaded the magisterial corporation to resistthe Notables. The judicial corporation or Parlement of Paris had beensuppressed under Lewis the Fifteenth, and unfortunately revived again atthe accession of his grandson. By the inconvenient constitution of theFrench government, the assent of that body was indispensable to fiscallegislation, on the ground that such legislation was part of the generalpolice of the realm. The king's minister, now Loménie de Brienne, devised a new judicial constitution. But the churchmen, the nobles, andthe lawyers all united in protestations against such a blow. The commonpeople are not always the best judges of a remedy for the evils underwhich they are the greatest sufferers, and they broke out in disorderboth in Paris and the provinces. They discerned an attack upon theirlocal independence. Nobody would accept office in the new courts, andthe administration of justice was at a standstill. A loan was thrownupon the market, but the public could not be persuaded to take it up. Itwas impossible to collect the taxes. The interest on the national debtwas unpaid, and the fundholder was dismayed and exasperated by anannouncement that only two-fifths would be discharged in cash. A verylarge part of the national debt was held in the form of annuities forlives, and men who had invested their savings on the credit of thegovernment, saw themselves left without a provision. The total number offundholders cannot be ascertained with any precision, but it must havebeen very considerable, especially in Paris and the other great cities. Add to these all the civil litigants in the kingdom, who had portions oftheir property virtually sequestrated by the suspension of the courtsinto which the property had been taken. The resentment of this immensebody of defrauded public creditors and injured private suitors explainsthe alienation of the middle class from the monarchy. In the convulsionsof our own time, the moneyed interests have been on one side, and thepopulation without money on the other. But in the first and greatestconvulsion, those who had nothing to lose found their animosities sharedby those who had had something to lose, and had lost it. 

Deliberative assemblies, then, had been tried, and ministers had beentried; both had failed, and there was no other device left, except onewhich was destructive to absolute monarchy. Lewis the Sixteenth was in1789 in much the same case as that of the King of England in 1640. Charles had done his best to raise money without any parliament fortwelve years: he had lost patience with the Short Parliament; finally, he was driven without choice or alternative to face as he best could thestout resolution and the wise patriotism of the Long Parliament. Mensometimes wonder how it was that Lewis, when he came to find theNational Assembly unmanageable, and discovering how rapidly he wasdrifting towards the thunders of the revolutionary cataract, did notbreak up a Chamber over which neither the court, nor even a minister sopopular as Necker, had the least control. It is a question whether thesword would not have broken in his hand. Even supposing, however, thatthe army would have consented to a violent movement against theAssembly, the King would still have been left in the same desperatestraits from which he had looked to the States-General to extricate him. He might perhaps have dispersed the Assembly; he could not disperse debtand deficit. Those monsters would have haunted him as implacably asever. There was no new formula of exorcism, nor any untried enchantment. The success of violent designs against the National Assembly, hadsuccess been possible, could, after all, have been followed by no otherconsummation than the relapse of France into the raging anarchy ofPoland, or the sullen decrepitude of Turkey. 

This will seem to some persons no better than fatalism. But, in truth, there are two popular ways of reading the history of events between 1789and 1794, and each of them seems to us as bad as the other. According toone, whatever happened in the Revolution was good and admirable, becauseit happened. According to the other, something good and admirable wasalways attainable, and, if only bad men had not interposed, always readyto happen. Of course, the only sensible view is that many of therevolutionary solutions were detestable, but no other solution waswithin reach. This is undoubtedly the best of possible worlds; if thebest is not so good as we could wish, that is the fault of thepossibilities. Such a doctrine is neither fatalism nor optimism, but anhonest recognition of long chains of cause and effect in human affairs. 

The great gathering of chosen men was first called States-General; thenit called itself National Assembly; it is commonly known in history asthe Constituent Assembly. The name is of ironical association, for theconstitution which it framed after much travail endured for no more thana few months. Its deliberations lasted from May 1789 until September1791. Among its members were three principal groups. There was, first, aband of blind adherents of the old system of government with all or mostof its abuses. Second, there was a Centre of timid and one-eyed men, whowere for transforming the old absolutist system into something thatshould resemble the constitution of our own country. Finally, there wasa Left, with some differences of shade, but all agreeing in thenecessity of a thorough remodelling of every institution and most of theusages of the country. 'Silence, you thirty votes!' cried Mirabeau oneday, when he was interrupted by the dissents of the Mountain. This wasthe original measure of the party that in the twinkling of an eye was towield the destinies of France. In our own time we have wondered at therapidity with which a Chamber that was one day on the point of bringingback the grandnephew of Lewis the Sixteenth, found itself a little latervoting that Republic which has since been ratified by the nation, andhas at this moment the ardent good wishes of every enlightenedpolitician in Europe. In the same way it is startling to think thatwithin three years of the beheading of Lewis the Sixteenth, there wasprobably not one serious republican in the representative assembly ofFrance. Yet it is always so. We might make just the same remark of theHouse of Commons at Westminster in 1640, and of the Assembly ofMassachusetts or of New York as late as 1770. The final flash of a longunconscious train of thought or intent is ever a surprise and a shock. It is a mistake to set these swift changes down to political levity;they were due rather to quickness of political intuition. It was theKing's attempt at flight in the summer of 1791 that first created arepublican party. It was that unhappy exploit, and no theoreticalpreferences, that awoke France to the necessity of choosing between thesacrifice of monarchy and the restoration of territorial aristocracy. 

Political intuition was never one of Robespierre's conspicuous gifts. But he had a doctrine that for a certain time served the same purpose. Rousseau had kindled in him a fervid democratic enthusiasm, and hadpenetrated his mind with the principle of the Sovereignty of the People. This famous dogma contained implicitly within it the more indisputabletruth that a society ought to be regulated with a view to the happinessof the people. Such a principle made it easier for Robespierre tointerpret rightly the first phases of the revolutionary movement. Ithelped him to discern that the concentrated physical force of thepopulace was the only sure protection against a civil war. And if acivil war had broken out in 1789, instead of 1793, all the advantages ofauthority would have been against the popular party. The firstinsurrection of Paris is associated with the harangue of CamilleDesmoulins at the Palais Royal, with the fall of the Bastille, with themurder of the governor, and a hundred other scenes of melodramatichorror and the blood-red picturesque. The insurrection of the Fourteenthof July 1789 taught Robespierre a lesson of practical politics, whichexactly fitted in with his previous theories. In his resentment againstthe oppressive disorder of monarchy and feudalism, he had accepted thecounter principle that the people can do no wrong, and nobody of sensenow doubts that in their first great act the people of Paris did whatwas right. Six days after the fall of the Bastille, the Centre were forissuing a proclamation denouncing popular violence and ordering rigorousvigilance. Robespierre was then so little known in the Assembly thateven his name was usually misspelt in the journals. From his obscurebench on the Mountain he cried out with bitter vehemence against theproposed proclamation:--'Revolt! But this revolt is liberty. The battleis not at its end. Tomorrow, it may be, the shameful designs against uswill be renewed; and who will there then be to repulse them, ifbeforehand we declare the very men to be rebels, who have rushed toarms for our protection and safety?' This was the cardinal truth of thesituation. Everybody knows Mirabeau's saying about Robespierre:--'Thatman will go far: he believes every word that he says!' This is much, butit is only half. It is not only that the man of power believes what hesays; what he believes must fit in with the facts and with the demandsof the time. Now Robespierre's firmness of conviction happened at thisstage to be rightly matched by his clearness of sight. 

It is true that a passionate mob, its unearthly admixture of laughterwith fury, of vacancy with deadly concentration, is as terrible as someuncouth antediluvian, or the unfamiliar monsters of the sea, or one ofthe giant plants that make men shudder with mysterious fear. The historyof our own country in the eighteenth century tells of the riots againstmeeting-houses in Doctor Sacheverell's time, and the riots againstpapists and their abettors in Lord George Gordon's time, andChurch-and-King riots in Doctor Priestley's time. It would be toodaring, therefore, to maintain that the rabble of the poor have any moreunerring political judgment than the rabble of the opulent. But, inFrance in 1789, Robespierre was justified in saying that revolt meantliberty. If there had been no revolt in July, the court party would havehad time to mature their infatuated designs of violence against theAssembly. In October these designs had come to life again. The royalistsat Versailles had exultant banquets, at which, in the presence of theQueen, they drank confusion to all patriots, and trampled the new emblemof freedom passionately underfoot. The news of this odious folly soontravelled to Paris. Its significance was speedily understood by apopulace whose wits were sharpened by famine. Thousands of fire-eyedwomen and men tramped intrepidly out towards Versailles. If they haddone less, the Assembly would have been dispersed or arbitrarilydecimated, even though such a measure would certainly have left thegovernment in desperation. 

At that dreadful moment of the Sixth of October, amid the slaughter ofguards and the frantic yells of hatred against the Queen, it is nowonder that some were found to urge the King to flee to Metz. If he hadaccepted the advice, the course of the Revolution would have beendifferent; but its march would have been just as irresistible, forrevolution lay in the force of a hundred combined circumstances. Lewis, however, rejected these counsels, and suffered the mob to carry him inbewildering procession to his capital and his prison. That great man whowas watching French affairs with such consuming eagerness from distantBeaconsfield in our English Buckinghamshire, instantly divined that thisprocession from Versailles to the Tuileries marked the fall of themonarchy. 'A revolution in sentiment, manners, and moral opinions, themost important of all revolutions in a word, ' was in Burke's judgment tobe dated from the Sixth of October 1789. 

The events of that day did, indeed, give its definite cast to thesituation. The moral authority of the sovereign came to an end, alongwith the ancient and reverend mystery of the inviolability of hisperson. The Count d'Artois, the King's second brother, one of the mostworthless of human beings, as incurably addicted to sinister andsuicidal counsels in 1789 as he was when he overthrew his own throneforty years later, had run away from peril and from duty after theinsurrection of July. After the insurrection of October, a troop of thenobles of the court followed him. The personal cowardice of theEmigrants was only matched by their political blindness. Many of themost unwise measures in the Assembly were only passed by smallmajorities, and the majorities would have been transformed intominorities, if in the early days of the Revolution these unworthy menhad only stood firm at their posts. Selfish oligarchies have scarcelyever been wanting in courage. The emigrant noblesse of France are almostthe only instance of a great privileged and territorial caste that hadas little bravery as they had patriotism. The explanation is that theyhad been an oligarchy, not of power or duty, but of self-indulgence. They were crushed by Richelieu to secure the unity of the monarchy. Theynow effaced themselves at the Revolution, and this secured that fargreater object, the unity of the nation. 

The disappearance of so many of the nobles from France was not the onlyabdication on the part of the conservative powers. Cowed and terrifiedby the events of October, no less than three hundred members of theAssembly sought to resign. The average attendance even at the mostimportant sittings was often incredibly small. Thus the Chamber came tohave little more moral authority in face of the people of Paris than hadthe King himself. The people of Paris had themselves become in a day themasters of France. 

This immense change led gradually to a decisive alteration in theposition of Robespierre. He found the situation of affairs at lastfalling into perfect harmony with his doctrine. Rousseau had taught himthat the people ought to be sovereign, and now the people were beingrecognised as sovereign _de facto_ no less than _de jure_. Anylimitations on the new divine right united the horror of blasphemy tothe secular wickedness of political treason. After the Assembly had cometo Paris, a famishing mob in a moment of mad fury murdered anunfortunate baker, who was suspected of keeping back bread. Theseparoxysms led to the enactment of a new martial law. Robespierre spokevehemently against it; such a law implied a wrongful distrust of thepeople. Then discussions followed as to the property qualification of anelector. Citizens were classed as active and passive. Only those were tohave votes who paid direct taxes to the amount of three days' wages inthe year. Robespierre flung himself upon this too famous distinctionwith bitter tenacity. If all men are equal, he cried, then all menought to have votes: if he who only pays the amount of one day's work, has fewer rights than another who pays the amount of three days, whyshould not the man who pays ten days have more rights than the other whoonly pays the earnings of three days? This kind of reasoning had littleweight with the Chamber, but it made the reasoner very popular with thethrong in the galleries. Even within the Assembly, influence graduallycame to the man who had a parcel of immutable axioms and postulates, andwho was ready with a deduction and a phrase for each case as it arose. He began to stand out like a needle of sharp rock, amid the flittingshadows of uncertain purpose and the vapoury drift of wandering aims. 

Robespierre had no social conception, and he had nothing which can bedescribed as a policy. He was the prophet of a sect, and had at thisperiod none of the aims of the chief of a political party. What he hadwas democratic doctrine, and an intrepid logic. And Robespierre'sintrepid logic was the nearest approach to calm force and coherentcharacter that the first three years of the Revolution brought intoprominence. When the Assembly met, Necker was the popular idol. Almostwithin a few weeks, this well-meaning, but very incompetent divinity hadslipped from his throne, and Lafayette had taken his place. Mirabeaucame next. The ardent and animated genius of his eloquence fitted himabove all men to ride the whirlwind and direct the storm. And on thememorable Twenty-third of June '89, he had shown the genuine audacityand resource of a revolutionary statesman, when he stirred the Chamberto defy the King's demand, and hailed the royal usher with theresounding words:--'You, sir, have neither place nor right of speech. Gotell those who sent you that we are here by the will of the people, andonly bayonets shall drive us hence!' But Mirabeau bore a taintedcharacter, and was always distrusted. 'Ah, how the immorality of myyouth, ' he used to say, in words that sum up the tragedy of many apuissant life, 'how the immorality of my youth hinders the public good!'The event proved that the popular suspicion was just: the patriot is nowno longer merely suspected, but known, to have sullied his hands withthe money of the court. He did not sell himself, it has been said; heallowed himself to be paid. The distinction was too subtle for men doingbattle for their lives and for freedom, and Mirabeau's popularity wanedtowards the middle of 1790. The next favourite was Barnave, the generousand high-minded spokesman of those sanguine spirits who to the very endhoped against hope to save both the throne and its occupant. By thespring of 1791 Barnave followed his predecessors into disfavour. TheAssembly was engaged on the burning question of the government of thecolonies. Were the negro slaves to be admitted to citizenship, or was alegislature of planters to be entrusted with the task of socialreformation? Our own generation has seen in the republic of the Westwhat strife this political difficulty is capable of raising. Barnavepronounced against the negroes. Robespierre, on the contrary, declaimedagainst any limitation of the right of the negro, as a compromise withthe avarice, pride, and cruelty of a governing race, and a guiltytrafficking with the rights of man. Barnave from that day saw that hislaurel crown had gone to Robespierre. 

If the people 'called him noble that was now their hate, him vile thatwas their garland, ' they did not transfer their affections without soundreason. Barnave's sensibility was too easily touched. There are manypoliticians in every epoch whose principles grow slack and flaccid atthe approach of the golden sun of royalty. Barnave was one of those whowas sent to bring back the fugitive King and Queen from Varennes, andthe journey by their side in the coach unstrung his spirit. He becameone of the court's clandestine advisers. Men of this weak susceptibilityof imagination are not fit for times of revolution. To be on the side ofthe court was to betray the cause of the nation. We cannot take too muchpains to realise that the voluntary conversion of Lewis the Sixteenth toa popular constitution and the abolition of feudalism, was practicallyas impossible as the conversion of Pope Pius the Ninth to the doctrineof a free church in a free state. Those who believe in the miracle offree will may think of this as they please. Sensible people who acceptthe scientific account of human character, know that the suddentransformation of a man or a woman brought up to middle age as the heirto centuries of absolutist tradition, into adherents of a governmentthat agreed with the doctrines of Locke and Milton, was only possible oncondition of supernatural interference. The King's good nature was nosubstitute for political capacity or insight. An instructive measure ofthe degree in which he possessed these two qualities may be found inthat deplorable diary of his, where on such days as the Fourteenth ofJuly, when the Bastille fell, and the Sixth of October, when he wascarried in triumph from Versailles to the Tuileries, he made the simpleentry, '_Rien_. ' And he had no firmness. It was as difficult to keep theKing to a purpose, La Marck said to Mirabeau, as to keep together anumber of well-oiled ivory balls. Lewis, moreover, was guided by a moreenergetic and less compliant character than his own. 

Marie Antoinette's high mien in adversity, and the contrast between thedazzling splendour of her first years and the scenes of outrage andbloody death that made the climax of her fate, could not but strike theimaginations of men. Such contrasts are the very stuff of which Tragedy, the gorgeous muse with scepter'd pall, loves to weave her most imposingraiment. But history must be just; and the character of the Queen hadfar more concern in the disaster of the first five years of theRevolution than had the character of Robespierre. Every new documentthat comes to light heaps up proof that if blind and obstinate choiceof personal gratification before the common weal be enough to constitutea state criminal, then the Queen of France was one of the worst statecriminals that ever afflicted a nation. The popular hatred of MarieAntoinette sprang from a sound instinct. We shall never know how much orhow little truth there was in those frightful charges against her, thatmay still be read in a thousand pamphlets. These imputed depravities farsurpass anything that John Knox ever said against Mary Stuart, or thatJuvenal has recorded against Messalina; and, perhaps, for the onlyparallel we must look to the hideous stories of the Byzantine secretaryagainst Theodora, the too famous empress of Justinian and the persecutorof Belisarius. We have to remember that all the revolutionary portraitsare distorted by furious passion, and that Marie Antoinette may no moredeserve to be compared to Mary Stuart than Robespierre deserves to becompared to Ezzelino or to Alva. The aristocrats were the libellers, iflibels they were. It is at least certain that, from the unlucky hourwhen the Austrian archduchess crossed the French frontier, a childishbride of fourteen, down to the hour when the Queen of France made theattempt to recross it in resentful flight one and twenty yearsafterwards, Marie Antoinette was ignorant, unteachable, blind to eventsand deaf to good counsels, a bitter grief to her heroic mother, the evilgenius of her husband, the despair of her truest advisers, and anexceedingly bad friend to the people of France. When Burke had thatimmortal vision of her at Versailles--'just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendour andjoy'--we know from the correspondence between Maria Theresa and herminister at Versailles, that what Burke really saw was no divinity, buta flighty and troublesome schoolgirl, an accomplice in all the ignobleintrigues, and a sharer of all the small busy passions, that convulsethe insects of a court. The levity that came with her Lorraine blood, broke out in incredible dissipations; in indiscreet visits to the maskedballs at the opera, in midnight parades and mystifications on theterrace at Versailles, in insensate gambling. 'The court of France isturned into a gaming-hell, ' said the Emperor Joseph, the Queen's ownbrother: 'if they do not amend, the revolution will be cruel. ' Thesevices or follies were less mischievous than her intervention in affairsof state. Here her levity was as marked as in the paltry affairs of theboudoir and the ante-chamber, and here to levity she added bothdissimulation and vindictiveness. It was the Queen's influence thatprocured the dismissal of the two virtuous ministers by whose aid theKing was striving to arrest the decay of the government of his kingdom. Malesherbes was distasteful to her for no better reason than that shewanted his post for some favourite's favourite. Against Turgot sheconspired with tenacious animosity, because he had suppressed asinecure which she designed for a court parasite, and because he wouldnot support her caprice on behalf of a worthless creature of herfaction. These two admirable men were disgraced on the same day. TheQueen wrote to her mother that she had not meddled in the affair. Thiswas a falsehood, for she had even sought to have Turgot thrown into theBastille. 'I am as one dashed to the ground, ' cried the great Voltaire, now nearing his end. 'Never can we console ourselves for having seen thegolden age dawn and vanish. My eyes see only death in front of me, nowthat Turgot is gone. The rest of my days must be all bitterness. ' Whathope could there be that the personage who had thus put out the light ofhope for France in 1776, would welcome that greater flame which waskindled in the land in 1789?

When people write hymns of pity for the Queen, we always recall the poorwoman whom Arthur Young met, as he was walking up a hill to ease hishorse near Mars-le-Tour. Though the unfortunate creature was onlytwenty-eight, she might have been taken for sixty or seventy, her figurewas so bent, her face so furrowed and hardened by toil. Her husband, shesaid, had a morsel of land, one cow, and a poor little horse, yet he hadto pay forty-two pounds of wheat and three chickens to one Seigneur, andone hundred and sixty pounds of oats, one chicken, and one franc toanother, besides very heavy tailles and other taxes; and they had sevenchildren. She had heard that 'something was to be done by some greatfolks for such poor ones, but she did not know who nor how, but God sendus better, for the tailles and the dues grind us to the earth. ' It wassuch hapless drudges as this who replenished the Queen's gaming tablesat Versailles. Thousands of them dragged on the burden of their harassedand desperate days, less like men and women than beasts of the fieldwrung and tortured and mercilessly overladen, in order that the Queenmight gratify her childish passion for diamonds, or lavish money andestates on worthless female Polignacs and Lamballes, or kill time at acost of five hundred louis a night at lansquenet and the faro bank. TheQueen, it is true, was in all this no worse than other dissipated womenthen and since. She did not realise that it was the system to which shehad stubbornly committed herself, that drove the people of the fields tocut their crops green to be baked in the oven, because their hungercould not wait; or made them cower whole days in their beds, becausemisery seemed to gnaw them there with a duller fang. That she wasunconscious of its effect, makes no difference in the real drift of herpolicy; makes no difference in the judgment that we ought to pass uponit, nor in the gratitude that is owed to the stern men who rose up toconsume her and her court with righteous flame. The Queen and thecourtiers, and the hard-faring woman of Mars-le-Tour, and that wholegeneration, have long been dust and shadow; they have vanished from theearth, as if they were no more than the fire-flies that the peasant ofthe Italian poet saw dancing in the vineyard, as he took his eveningrest on the hillside. They have all fled back into the impenetrableshade whence they came; our minds are free; and if social equity is nota chimera, Marie Antoinette was the protagonist of the most barbarousand execrable of causes. 

 * * * * *

Let us return to the shaping of the Constitution, not forgetting thatits stability was to depend upon the Queen. Robespierre left somecharacteristic marks on the final arrangements. He imposed upon theAssembly a motion prohibiting any member of it from accepting officeunder the Crown for a period of four years after the dissolution. Robespierre from this time forth constantly illustrated a very singulartruth; namely, that the most ostentatious faith in humanity in generalseems always to beget the sharpest distrust of all human beings inparticular. He proceeded further in the same direction. It wasRobespierre who persuaded the Chamber to pass a self-denying ordinance. All its members were declared ineligible for a seat in the legislaturethat was to replace them. The members of the Right on this occasion wentwith their bitter foes of the Extreme Left, and to both parties havebeen imputed sinister and Machiavellian motives. The Right, aware thattheir own return to the new Assembly was impossible, were delighted toreduce the men with whom they had been carrying on incensed battle fortwo long years, to their own obscurity and impotence. Robespierre, onthe other hand, is accused of a jealous desire to exclude Barnave frompower. He is accused also of a deliberate intention to weaken the newlegislature, in order to secure the preponderance of the Parisian clubs. There is no evidence that these malignant feelings were in Robespierre'smind. The reasons he gave were exactly of the kind that we should haveexpected to weigh with a man of his stamp. There is even a certain truthin them, that is not inconsistent with the experience of a parliamentarycountry like our own. To talk, he said, of the transmission of light andexperience from one assembly to another, was to distrust the publicspirit. The influence of opinion and the general good grows less, as theinfluence of parliamentary orators grows greater. He had no taste, heproceeded with one of his chilly sneers, for that new science which wasstyled the tactics of great assemblies; it was too like intrigue. Nothing but truth and reason ought to reign in a legislature. He did notlike the idea of clever men becoming dominant by skilful tactics, andthen perpetuating their empire from one assembly to another. He wound uphis discourse with some theatrical talk about disinterestedness. When hesat down, he was greeted with enthusiastic acclamations, such as a fewmonths before used to greet the stormful Mirabeau, now wrapped ineternal sleep amid the stillness of the new Pantheon. The folly ofRobespierre's inferences is obvious enough. If only truth and reasonought to weigh in a legislature, then it is all the more important notto exclude any body of men through whom truth and reason may possiblyenter. Robespierre had striven hard to remove all restrictions fromadmission to the electoral franchise. He did not see that to limit thechoice of candidates was in itself the most grievous of allrestrictions. 

The common view has been that the Constitution of 1791 perished becauseits creators were thus disabled from defending the work of their hands. This view led to a grave mistake four years later, after Robespierre hadgone to his grave. The Convention, framing the Constitution of the YearIII. , decided that two-thirds of the existing assembly should keep theirplaces, and that only one-third should be popularly elected. This led tothe revolt of the Thirteenth Vendémiaire, and afterwards to the coupd'état of the Eighteenth Fructidor. In that sense, no doubt, Robespierre's proposal was the indirect root of much mischief. But it ischildish to believe that if a hundred of the most prominent members ofthe Constituent had found seats in the new assembly, they would havesaved the Constitution. Their experience, the loss of which it is thefashion to deplore, could have had no application to the strangecombinations of untoward circumstance that were now rising up with suchdeadly rapidity in every quarter of the horizon, like vast sombre banksof impenetrable cloud. Prudence in new cases, as has been somewheresaid, can do nothing on grounds of retrospect. The work of theConstituent was doomed by the very nature of things. Their assumptionthat the Revolution was made, while all France was still torn by fierceand unappeasable disputes as to seignorial rights, was one of the moststriking pieces of self-deception in history. It is told how in theeleventh century, when the fervent hosts of the Crusaders tramped acrossEurope on their way to deliver the Holy City from the hands of theunbelievers, the wearied children, as they espied each new town that layin their interminable march, cried out with joyful expectation, 'Is notthis, then, Jerusalem?' So France had set out on a portentous journey, little knowing how far off was the end; lightly taking each poorhalting-place for the deeply longed-for goal; and waxing more fiercelydisappointed, as each new height that they gained only disclosed yetfarther and more unattainable horizons. 'Alas, ' said Burke, 'they littleknow how many a weary step is to be taken, before they can formthemselves into a mass which has a true political personality. '

An immense revolution had been effected, but by what force were itsfruits to be guarded? Each step in the revolution had raised a host ofirreconcilable enemies. The rights of property, the old and jealousassociations of local independence, the traditions of personal dignity, the relations of the civil to the spiritual power--these were themomentous matters about which the lawmakers of the Constituent hadexercised themselves. The parties of the Chamber had for these twoyears past been laying mine and countermine among the very deepestfoundations of society. One by one each great corporation of the oldorder had been alienated from the new order. It was inevitable that itshould be so. Let us look at one or two examples of this. The monarchyhad imposed administrative centralisation upon France without securingnational unity. Thus the great provinces that had been slowly added oneafter the other to the monarchy, while becoming members of the samekingdom, still retained different institutions and isolated usages. Thetime was now come when France should be France, and its inhabitantsFrenchmen, and no longer Bretons, Normans, Gascons, Provençals. TheAssembly by a single decree (1790) redivided the country intoeighty-three departments. It wiped out at a stroke the separateadministrations, the separate parlements, the peculiar privileges, andeven the historic names of the old provinces. We need not dwell on thesignificance of this change here, but will only remark in passing thatthe stubborn disputes from the time of the Regency downwards between theCrown and the provincial parlements turned, under other names and inother forms, upon this very issue of the unification of the law. TheCrown was with the progressive party, but it lacked the strength andcourage to set aside retrograde local sentiment as the ConstituentAssembly was able to set it aside. 

Then this prodigious change in the distribution of government wasaccompanied by no less prodigious a change in the source of power. Popular election replaced the old system of territorial privilege andaristocratic prerogative. The effect of this vital innovation, followedas it was a few months later by a decree abolishing titles and armorialbearings, was to complete the estrangement of the old privileged classesfrom the revolutionary movement. All that they had meant to concede wasthe payment of an equal land tax. What was life worth to the noble, ifcommon people were to be allowed to wear arms and to command a companyof foot or a troop of horse; if he was no longer to have thousands ofacres left waste for the chase; if he was compelled to sue for a votewhere he had only yesterday reigned as manorial lord; if, in short, hewas at a stroke to lose all those delights of insolence and vanity whichhad made, not the decoration, but the very substance, of his days?

Nor were the nobles of the sword and the red-heeled slipper the onlyoutraged class. The magistracy of the provincial parliaments wereinflamed with resentment against changes that stripped them of the powerof exciting against the new government the same factious andimpracticable spirit with which they had on so many occasionsembarrassed the old. The clergy were thrown even still more violentlyinto opposition. The Assembly, sorely pressed for resources, declaredthe property held by ecclesiastics, amounting to a revenue of not lessthan eight million pounds sterling a year, or double that amount inmodern values, to be the property of the nation. Talleyrand carried ameasure decreeing the sale of the ecclesiastical domain. The clergy wereas intensely irritated as laymen would have been by a similar assertionof sovereign right. And their irritation was made still more dangerousby the next set of measures against them. 

The Assembly withdrew all recognition of Catholicism as the religion ofthe State; monastic vows were abolished, and orders and congregationssuppressed; the ecclesiastical divisions were made to coincide with thecivil divisions, a bishop being allotted to each department. What was amore important revolution than all, bishops and incumbents werehenceforth to be appointed by popular election. The Assembly, who hadalways the institutions of our own country before them, meant tointroduce into France the system of the Church of England, which waseven then an anachronism in the land of its birth; much worse was such asystem an anachronism, after belief had been sapped by a Voltaire and anEncyclopædia. The clergy both showed and excited a mutinous spirit. TheAssembly, by way of retort, decreed that all ecclesiastics should takethe oath of allegiance to the civil constitution of the clergy, on painof forfeiture of their benefices. Five-sixths of the clergy refused, andthe result was an outbreak of religious fury in the great towns of thesouth and elsewhere, which recalled the violence of the sixteenthcentury and the Reformation. 

Thus when the Constituent Assembly ceased from its labours, the popularparty had to face the mocking and defiant privileged classes; themagistracy, whose craft and calling were gone; and the clergy and asmany of the flocks as shared the holy vindictiveness of their pastors. Immense material improvements had been made, but who was to guard themagainst all these powerful and exasperated bands? No chamber couldexecute so portentous an office, least of all a chamber that was boundto work in accord with a King, who at the very moment when he wasswearing fidelity to the new order of things, was sending entreaties tothe King of Prussia and to the Emperor, his brother-in-law, to overthrowthe new order and bring back the old. If the Revolution had achievedpriceless gains for France, they could only be preserved on conditionthat public action was directed by those who valued these gains forthemselves and for their children above all things else--above themonarchy, above the constitution, above peace, above their own sorrylives. There was only one party who showed this passionate devotion, this fanatical resolution not to suffer the work that had been done tobe undone, and never to allow France to sink back from exalted nationallife into the lethargy of national death. That party was the Jacobins, and, above all, the austere and rigorous Jacobins of Paris. On theirascendancy depended the triumph of the Revolution, and on the triumph ofthe Revolution depended the salvation of France. Their ascendancy meanta Jacobin dictatorship, and against this, as against dictatorship in allits forms, many things have been said, and truly said. But the one mostimportant thing that can be said about Jacobin dictatorship is that, inspite of all the dolorous mishaps and hateful misdeeds that marked itscourse, it was still the only instrument capable of concentrating andutilising the dispersed social energy of the French people. The crisiswas not a crisis of logic but of force, and the Jacobins aloneunderstood, as the old Covenanters had understood, that problems offorce are not solved by phrases, but by mastery and the sword. 

The great popular club of Paris was the centre of all those who lookedat events in this spirit. The Legislative Assembly, the successor of theConstituent, met in the month of October 1791. Like its predecessor, theLegislative contained a host of excellent and patriotic men, and they atonce applied themselves to the all-important task, which the Constituenthad left so deplorably incomplete, of finally breaking down the oldfeudal rights. The most important group in the new chamber were thedeputies from the Gironde. Events soon revealed violent dissents betweenthe Girondins and the Jacobins, but, for some months after the meetingof the Legislative, Girondins and Jacobins represented together inunbroken unity the great popular party. From this time until the fall ofthe monarchy, the whole of this popular party in all its branches foundtheir rallying-place, not in the Assembly, but in the Jacobin Club; andthe ascendancy of the Jacobin Club embodied the dictatorship of Paris. It was only from Paris that the whole circle of events could becommanded. When the peasants had got what they wanted, that is to saythe emancipation of the land, they were ready to think that theRevolution was in safety and at an end. They were in no position to seethe enmity of the exiles, the dangerous selfishness of Austria andPrussia, the disloyal machinations of the court, the reactionarysentiment of La Vendée, the absolute unworkableness of the newconstitution. Arthur Young, in the height of the agitations of theConstituent Assembly, found himself at Moulins, the capital of theBourbonnais, and on the great post-road to Italy. He went to the bestcoffee-house in the town, and found as many as twenty tables spread forcompany, but as for a newspaper, he says he might as well have asked foran elephant. In the capital of a great province, the seat of anintendant, at a moment like that, with a National Assembly voting arevolution, and not a newspaper to tell the people whether Fayette, Mirabeau, or Lewis XVI. Were on the throne! Could such a people as this, he cries, ever have made a revolution or become free? 'Never in athousand centuries: the enlightened mob of Paris have done the whole. 'And that was the plain truth. What was involved in such a truth, weshall see presently. 

Robespierre had now risen to be one of the foremost men in France. Toborrow the figure of an older chief of French faction, from triflingamong the violins in the orchestra, he had ascended to the stage itself, and had a right to perform leading parts. Disqualified for sitting inthe Assembly, he wielded greater power than ever in the Club. TheConstituent had been full of his enemies. 'Alone with my own soul, ' heonce cried to the Jacobins, 'how could I have borne struggles that werebeyond any human strength, if I had not raised my spirit to God?' Thisisolation marked him with a kind of theocratic distinction. Thesecommunings with the unseen powers gave a certain indefinable prerogativeto a man, even among the children of the century of Voltaire. Condorcet, the youngest of the intimates and disciples of Voltaire, of D'Alembert, of Turgot, was the first to sound bitter warning that Robespierre was atheart a priest. The suggestion was more than a gibe. Robespierre had thetypic sacerdotal temperament, its sense of personal importance, its thinunction, its private leanings to the stake and the cord; and he had oneof those deplorable natures that seem as if they had never in theirlives known the careless joys of a springtime. By and by, from merepriest he developed into the deadlier carnivore, the Inquisitor. 

The absence of advantages of bodily presence has never been fatal to thepretensions of the pontiff. Robespierre was only a couple of inchesabove five feet in height, but the Grand Monarch himself was hardlymore. His eyes were small and weak, and he usually wore spectacles; hisface was pitted by the marks of small-pox; his complexion was dull andsometimes livid; the tones of his voice were dry and shrill; and hespoke with the vulgar accent of his province. Such is the acceptedtradition, and there is no reason to dissent from it. It is fair, however, to remember that Robespierre's enemies had command of hishistoric reputation at its source, and this is always a great advantagefor faction, if not for truth. So Robespierre's voice and person mayhave been maligned, just as Aristophanes may have been a calumniatorwhen he accused Cleon of having an intolerably loud voice and smellingof the tanyard. What is certain is that Robespierre was a master ofeffective oratory adapted for a violent popular audience, to impress, topersuade, and to command. The Convention would have yawned, if it hadnot trembled under him, but the Jacobin Club never found him tedious. Robespierre's style had no richness either of feeling or of phrase; nofervid originality, no happy violences. If we turn from a page ofRousseau to a page of Robespierre, we feel that the disciple has none ofthe thrilling sonorousness of the master; the glow and the ardour havebecome metallic; the long-drawn plangency is parodied by shrill notes ofsplenetic complaint. The rhythm has no broad wings; the phrases have noquality of radiance; the oratorical glimpses never lift the spirit intonew worlds. We are never conscious of those great pulses of strongemotion that shake and vibrate through the nobly-measured periods ofCicero or Bossuet or Burke. Robespierre could not rival the vivid andhighly-coloured declamation of Vergniaud; his speeches were never heatedwith the ardent passion that poured like a torrent of fire through someof the orations of Isnard; nor, above all, had he any mastery of thatdialect of the Titans, by which Danton convulsed an audience with fear, with amazement, or with the spirit of defiant endeavour. The absence ofthese intenser qualities did not make Robespierre's speeches lesseffective for their own purpose. On the contrary, when the air hasbecome torrid, and passionate utterance is cheap, then severity in formis very likely to pass for good sense in substance. That Robespierre haddecent fluency, copiousness, and finish, need hardly be said. The Frenchhave an artistic sense; they have never accepted our own whimsicaldoctrine, that a man's politics must be sagacious, if his speaking isonly clumsy enough. Robespierre more than once showed himself ready witha forcible reply on critical occasions: this only makes him anillustration the more of the good oratorical rule, that he is mostlikely to come well out of the emergency of an improvisation, who isusually most careful to prepare. Robespierre was as solicitous about thecorrectness of his speech, as he was about the neatness of his clothes;he no more grudged the pains given to the polishing of his discoursesthan he grudged the time given every day to the powdering of his hair. 

Nothing was more remarkable than his dexterity in presenting his case. James Mill used to point out to his son among other skilful arts ofDemosthenes, these two: first, that he said everything important to hispurpose at the exact moment when he had brought the minds of his hearersinto the state most fitted to receive it; second, that he insinuatedgradually and indirectly into their minds ideas which would have rousedopposition if they had been expressed more directly. Mr. Mill oncecalled the attention of the present writer to exactly the same kind ofrhetorical skill in the speeches of Robespierre. The reader may do wellto turn, for excellent specimens of this, to the speech of January 11, 1792, against the war, or that of May 1794 against atheism. The logic isstringent, but the premises are arbitrary. Robespierre is as one whoshould iterate indisputable propositions of abstract geometry andmechanics, while men are craving an architect who shall bridge the gulfof waters. Exuberance of high words no longer conceals the sterility ofhis ideas and the shallowness of his method. We should say of hisspeeches, as of so much of the speaking and writing of the time, that itis transparent and smooth, but there is none of that quality which thecritics of painting call Texture. 

His listeners, however, in the old refectory of the Convent of theJacobins took little heed of these things; the matter was too absorbing, the issue too vital. A hundred years before, the hunted Covenanters ofthe Western Lowlands, with Claverhouse's dragoons a few miles off, exulted in the endless exhortations and expositions of their hillpreachers: they relished nothing so keenly as three hours ofMucklewrath, followed by three hours more of Peter Poundtext. We nowfind the jargon of the Mucklewraths and the Poundtexts of the SolemnLeague and Covenant, dead as it is, still not devoid of the picturesqueand the impressive. If we cannot say the same of the great preacher ofthe Declaration of the Rights of Man, the reason is partly that time hasnot yet softened the tones, and partly that there is no one in all theworld with whom it is so difficult to sympathise, as with the narrowerfanatics of our own particular faith. 

We have still to mark the trait that above everything else gave toRobespierre the trust and confidence of Paris. As men listened to him, they had full faith in the integrity of the speaker. And Robespierre inone way deserved this confidence. He was eminently the possessor of aconscience. When the strain of circumstance in the last few months ofhis life pressed him towards wrong, at least before doing wrong he wasforced to lie to his own conscience. This is a kind of honesty, as theworld goes. In the Salon of 1791 an artist exhibited Robespierre'sportrait, simply inscribing it, _The Incorruptible_. Throngs passedbefore it every day, and ratified the honourable designation by eagermurmurs of approval. The democratic journals were loud in panegyric onthe unsleeping sentinel of liberty. They loved to speak of him as themodern Fabricius, and delighted to recall the words of Pyrrhus, that itis easier to turn the sun from its course, than to turn Fabricius fromthe path of honour. Patriotic parents eagerly besought him to be sponsorfor their children. Ladies of wealth, including at least onecountrywoman of our own, vainly entreated him to accept their purses, for women are quick to recognise the temperament of the priest, andrecognising they adore. A rich widow of Nantes besought him withpertinacious tenderness to accept not only her purse but her hand. Mirabeau's sister hailed him as an eagle floating through the blueheavens. 

Robespierre's life was frugal and simple, as must always be seemly inthe spokesman of the dumb multitude whose lives are very hard. He had asingle room in the house of Duplay, at the extreme west end of the longRue Saint Honoré, half a mile from the Jacobin Club, and less than thatfrom the Riding School of the Tuileries, where the Constituent andLegislative Assemblies held session. His room, which served him forbed-chamber as well as for the uses of the day, was scantily furnished, and he shared the homely fare of his host. Duplay was a carpenter, asworn follower of Robespierre, and the whole family cherished theirguest as if he had been a son and a brother. Between him and the eldestdaughter of the house there grew up a more tender sentiment, andRobespierre looked forward to the joys of the hearth, so soon as hiscountry should be delivered from the oppressors without and the traitorswithin. 

Eagerly as Robespierre delighted in his popularity, he intended it tobe a force and not a decoration. An occasion of testing his influencearose in the winter of 1791. The situation had become more and moredifficult. The court was more disloyal and more perverse, as its hopesthat the nightmare would come to an end became fainter. In the summer of1791, the German Emperor, the King of Prussia, and minor champions ofretrograde causes issued the famous Declaration of Pilnitz. The menaceof intervention was the one element needed to make the position of themonarchy desperate. It roused France to fever heat. For along with theforeign kings were the French princes of the blood and the Frenchnobles. In the spring of 1792, the Assembly forced the King to declarewar against Austria. Robespierre, in spite of the strong tide of warlikefeeling, led the Jacobin opposition to the war. This is one of the mostsagacious acts of his career, for the hazards of the conflict wereterrible. If the foreigners and the emigrant nobles were victorious, allthat the Revolution had won would be instantly and irretrievably lost. If, on the other hand, the French armies were victorious, one of twodisasters might follow. Either the troops might become a weapon in thehands of the court and the reactionary party, for the suppression of allthe progressive parties alike; or else their general might make himselfsupreme. Robespierre divined, what the Girondins did not, that Narbonneand the court, in accepting the cry for war, were secretly designing, first, to crush the faction of emigrant nobles, then to make the Kingpopular at home, and thus finally to construct a strong royalist army. The Constitutional party in the Legislative Assembly had the same ideasas Narbonne. The Girondins sought war; first, from a genuine, if not aprofoundly wise, enthusiasm for liberty, which they would fain havespread all over the world; and next, because they thought that war wouldincrease their popularity, and give them decisive control of thesituation. 

The first effect of the war declared in April 1792 was to shake down thethrone. Operations had no sooner begun than the King became an object ofbitter and amply warranted suspicion. Neither the leaders nor the peoplehad forgotten his flight a year before to place himself at the head ofthe foreign invaders, nor the letter that he had left behind him for theNational Assembly, protesting against all that had been done. They wereagain reminded of what short shrift they might expect if the King'sfriends should come back. The Duke of Brunswick at the head of theforeign army set out on his march, and issued his famous proclamation tothe inhabitants of France. He demanded immediate and unconditionalsubmission; he threatened with fire and sword every town, village, orhamlet, that should dare to defend itself; and finally, he swore that ifthe smallest violence or insult were done to the King or his family, thecity of Paris should be handed over to military execution and absolutedestruction. This insensate document bears marks in every line of theimplacable hate and burning thirst for revenge that consumed thearistocratic refugees. Only civil war can awaken such rage asBrunswick's manifesto betrayed. It was drawn up by the French nobles atCoblenz. He merely signed it. The reply to it was the memorableinsurrection of the Tenth of August 1792. The King was thrown intoprison, and the Legislative Assembly made way for the NationalConvention. 

Robespierre's part in the great rising of August was only secondary. Only a few weeks before he had started a journal and written articles ina constitutional sense. M. D'Héricault believes a story thatRobespierre's aim in this had been to have himself accepted as tutor forthe young Dauphin. It is impossible to prove a negative, but we findgreat difficulty in believing that such a post could ever have been anobject of Robespierre's ambition. Now and always he showed a rathersingular preference for the substance of power over its glitter. He wasvain and an egoist, but in spite of this, and in spite of his passionfor empty phrases, he was not without a sense of reality. 

The insurrection of the 10th of August, however, was the idea, not ofRobespierre, but of a more commanding personage, who now became one ofthe foremost of the Jacobin chiefs. De Maistre, that ardent champion ofreaction, found a striking argument for the presence of the divine handin the Revolution, in the intense mediocrity of the revolutionaryleaders. How could such men, he asked, have achieved such results, ifthey had not been instruments of the directing will of heaven? Danton atany rate is above this caustic criticism. Danton was of the Herculeantype of a Luther, though without Luther's deep vision of spiritualthings; or a Chatham, though without Chatham's august majesty of life;or a Cromwell, though without Cromwell's calm steadfastness of patrioticpurpose. His visage and port seemed to declare his character: darkoverhanging brows; eyes that had the gleam of lightning; a savage mouth;an immense head; the voice of a Stentor. Madame Roland pictured him as afiercer Sardanapalus. Artists called him Jove the Thunderer. His enemiessaw in him the Satan of the Paradise Lost. He was no moral regenerator;the difference between him and Robespierre is typified in Danton'sversion of an old saying, that he who hates vices hates men. He was notfree from that careless life-contemning desperation, which sometimesbelongs to forcible natures. Danton cannot be called noble, becausenobility implies a purity, an elevation, and a kind of seriousness whichwere not his. He was too heedless of his good name, and too blind to thetruth that though right and wrong may be near neighbours, yet the linethat separates them is of an awful sacredness. If Robespierre passed fora hypocrite by reason of his scruple, Danton seemed a desperado by hisairs of 'immoral thoughtlessness. ' But the world forgives much to aroyal size, and Danton was one of the men who strike deep notes. He hadthat largeness of motive, fulness of nature, and capaciousness of mind, which will always redeem a multitude of infirmities. 

Though the author of some of the most tremendous and far-soundingphrases of an epoch that was only too rich in them, yet phrases had noempire over him; he was their master, not their dupe. Of all the men whosucceeded Mirabeau as directors of the unchained forces, we feel thatDanton alone was in his true element. Action, which poisoned the bloodof such men as Robespierre, and drove such men as Vergniaud out of theirsenses with exaltation, was to Danton his native sphere. When France wasfor a moment discouraged, it was he who nerved her to new effort by theelectrifying cry, '_We must dare, and again dare, and without enddare!_' If his rivals or his friends seemed too intent on trifles, tooapt to confound side issues with the central aim of the battle, Dantonwas ever ready to urge them to take a juster measure:--'_When theedifice is all ablaze, I take little heed of the knaves who arepilfering the household goods; I rush to put out the flames. _' When baseegoism was compromising a cause more priceless than the personality ofany man, it was Danton who made them ashamed by the soul-inspiringexclamation, '_Let my name be blotted out and my memory perish, if onlyFrance may be free. _' The Girondins denounced the popular clubs of Parisas hives of lawlessness and outrage. Danton warned them that it werewiser to go to these seething societies and to guide them, than to wastebreath in futile denunciation. 'A nation in revolution, ' he cried tothem, in a superb figure, 'is like the bronze boiling and foaming andpurifying itself in the cauldron. Not yet is the statue of Liberty cast. Fiercely boils the metal; have an eye on the furnace, or the flame willsurely scorch you. ' If there was murderous work below the hatches, thatwas all the more reason why the steersman should keep his hand strongand ready on the wheel, with an eye quick for each new drift in thehurricane, and each new set in the raging currents. This is ever thefigure under which one conceives Danton--a Titanic shape doing battlewith the fury of the seas, yielding while flood upon flood sweeps wildlyover him, and then with unshaken foothold and undaunted front once moresurveying the waste of waters, and striving with dexterous energy toforce the straining vessel over the waters of the bar. 

La Fayette had called the huge giant of popular force from its squalidlurking-places, and now he trembled before its presence, and fled fromit shrieking, with averted hands. Marat thrust swords into the giant'shalf-unwilling grasp, and plied him with bloody incitement to slay hipand thigh, and so filled the land with a horror that has not faded fromout of men's minds to this day. Danton instantly discerned that theproblem was to preserve revolutionary energy, and still to persuade theinsurgent forces to retire once more within their boundaries. Robespierre discerned this too, but he was paralysed and bewildered byhis own principles, as the convinced doctrinaire is so apt to be amidthe perplexities of practice. The teaching of Rousseau was ever pouringlike thin smoke among his ideas, and clouding his view of actualconditions. The Tenth of August produced a considerable change inRobespierre's point of view. It awoke him to the precipitous steepnessof the slope down which the revolutionary car was rushing headlong. Hisfaith in the infallibility of the people suffered no shock, but he wasin a moment alive to the need of walking warily, and his whole marchfrom now until the end, twenty-three months later, became timorous, cunning, and oblique. His intelligence seemed to move in subterraneantunnels, with the gleam of an equivocal premiss at one end, and the mistof a vague conclusion at the other. 

The enthusiastic pedant, with his narrow understanding, his thin purism, and his idyllic sentimentalism, found that the summoning archangel ofhis paradise proved to be a ruffian with a pike. The shock must havebeen tremendous. Robespierre did not quail nor retreat; he only revisedhis notion of the situation. A curious interview once took place betweenhim and Marat. Robespierre began by assuring the Friend of the Peoplethat he quite understood the atrocious demands for blood with which thecolumns of Marat's newspaper were filled, to be merely usefulexaggerations of his real designs. Marat repelled the disparagingimputation of clemency and common sense, and talked in his familiar veinof poniarding brigands, burning despots alive in their palaces, andimpaling the traitors of the Assembly on their own benches. 'Robespierre, ' says Marat, 'listened to me with affright; he turned paleand said nothing. The interview confirmed the opinion I had always hadof him, that he united the integrity of a thoroughly honest man and thezeal of a good patriot, with the enlightenment of a wise senator, butthat he was without either the views or the audacity of a realstatesman. ' The picture is instructive, for it shows us Robespierre'sinvariable habit of leaving violence and iniquity unrebuked; ofconciliating the practitioners of violence and iniquity; and ofcontenting himself with an inward hope of turning the world into a rightcourse by fine words. He had no audacity in Marat's sense, but he was nocoward. He knew, as all these men knew, that almost from hour to hour hecarried his life in his hand, yet he declined to seek shelter in theobscurity which saved such men as Sieyès. But if he had courage, he hadnot the initiative of a man of action. He invented none of the ideas ormethods of the Revolution, not even the Reign of Terror, but he was verydexterous in accepting or appropriating what more audacious spirits thanhimself had devised and enforced. The pedant, cursed with the ambitionto be a ruler of men, is a curious study. He would be glad not to go toofar, and yet his chief dread is lest he be left behind. Hisconsciousness of pure aims allows him to become an accomplice in theworst crimes. Suspecting himself at bottom to be a theorist, he hastensto clear his character as man of practice by conniving at an enormity. Thus, in September 1792, a band of miscreants committed the grievousmassacres in the prisons of Paris. Robespierre, though the best evidencegoes to show that he not only did not abet the prison murders, but inhis heart deplored them, yet after the event did not scruple to justifywhat had been done. This was the beginning of a long course ofcompliance with sanguinary misdeeds, for which Robespierre has been ashotly execrated as if he prompted them. We do not, for the moment, measure the relative degrees of guilt that attached to mere complianceon the one hand, and cruel origination on the other. But his position inthe Revolution is not rightly understood, unless we recognise him asbeing in almost every case an accessory after the fact. 

Between the fall of Lewis in 1792 and the fall of Robespierre in 1794, France was the scene of two main series of events. One set comprises therepulse of the invaders, the suppression of an extensive civil war, andthe attempted reconstruction of a social framework. The other comprisesthe rapid phases of an internecine struggle of violent and short-livedfactions. By an unhappy fatality, due partly to anti-democraticprejudice, and partly to men's unfailing passion for melodrama, theReign of Terror has been popularly taken for the central and mostimportant part of the revolutionary epic. This is nearly as absurd as itwould be to make Gustave Flourens' manifestation of the Fifth ofOctober, or the rising of the Thirty-first of October, the mostprominent features in a history of the war of French defence in our ownday. In truth, the Terror was a mere episode; and just as the rising ofOctober 1870 was due to Marshal Bazaine's capitulation at Metz, it iseasy to see that, with one exception, every violent movement in Paris, from 1792 to 1794, was due to menace or disaster on the frontier. Everyone of the famous days of Paris was an answer to some enemy without. Thestorm of the Tuileries on the Tenth of August, as we have already said, was the response to Brunswick's proclamation. The bloody days ofSeptember were the reaction of panic at the capture of Longwy and Verdunby the Prussians. The surrender of Cambrai provoked the execution ofMarie Antoinette. The defeat of Aix-la-Chapelle produced the abortiveinsurrection of the Tenth of March; and the treason of Dumouriez, thereverses of Custine, and the rebellion in La Vendée, produced theeffectual insurrection of the Thirty-first of May 1793. The last ofthese two risings of Paris, headed by the Commune, against theConvention which was until then controlled by the Girondins, at lengthgave the government of France and the defence of the Revolutiondefinitely over to the Jacobins. Their patriotic dictatorship lastedunbroken for a short period of ten months, and then the great partybroke up into factions. The splendid triumphs of the dictatorship havebeen, in England at any rate, too usually forgotten, and only the crimesof the factions remembered. Robespierre's history unfortunately belongsto the less important battle. 

II

The Girondins were driven out of the Convention by the insurgentParisians at the beginning of June 1793. The movement may be roughlycompared to that of the Independents in our own Rebellion, when the armycompelled the withdrawal of eleven of the Presbyterian leaders from theparliament; or, it may recall Pride's memorable Purge of the same famousassembly. Both cases illustrate the common truth that large deliberativebodies, be they never so excellent for purposes of legislation, and evenfor a general control of the executive government in ordinary times, arefound to be essentially unfit for directing a military crisis. If thereare any historic examples that at first seem to contradict such aproposition, it will be found that the bodies in question were closearistocracies, like the Great Council of Venice, or the Senate of Romein the strong days of the Commonwealth; they were never the creatures ofpopular election, with varying aims and a diversified political spirit. Modern publicists have substituted the divine right of assemblies forthe old divine right of monarchies. Those who condone the violence doneto the King on the Tenth of August, and even acquiesce in his executionfive months afterwards, are relentless against the violence done to theConvention on the Thirty-first of May. We confess ourselves unable tofollow this transfer of the superstition of sacrosanctity from a king toa chamber. No doubt, the sooner a nation acquires a settled government, the better for it, provided the government be efficient. But if it benot efficient, the mischief of actively suppressing it may well be fullyoutweighed by the mischief of retaining it. We have no wish to smoothover the perversities of a revolutionary time; they cost a nation verydear; but if all the elements of the state are in furious convulsion anduncontrollable effervescence, then it is childish to measure the marchof events by the standard of happier days of social peace and politicalorder. The prospect before France at the violent close of Girondinsupremacy was as formidable as any nation has ever yet had to confrontin the history of the world. Rome was not more critically placed whenthe defeat of Varro on the plain of Cannæ had broken up her alliancesand ruined her army. The brave patriots of the Netherlands had nogloomier outlook at that dolorous moment when the Prince of Orange hadleft them, and Alva had been appointed to bring them back by rapine, conflagration, and murder, under the loathed yoke of the Spanish tyrant. 

Let us realise the conditions that Robespierre and Danton and the otherJacobin leaders had now to face. In the north-west one division of thefugitive Girondins was forming an army at Caen; in the south-westanother division was doing the same at Bordeaux. Marseilles and Lyonswere rallying all the disaffected and reactionary elements in thesouth-east. La Vendée had flamed out in wild rebellion for Church andKing. The strong places on the north frontier, and the strong places onthe east, were in the hands of the foreign enemy. The fate of theRevolution lay in the issue of a struggle between Paris, with less thana score of departments on her side, and all the rest of France and thewhole European coalition marshalled against her. And even this was notthe worst. In Paris itself a very considerable proportion of itshalf-million of inhabitants were disaffected to the revolutionary cause. Reactionary historians dwell on the fact that such risings as that ofthe Tenth of August were devised by no more than half of the sectionsinto which Paris was divided. It was common, they say, for half a dozenindividuals to take upon themselves to represent the fourteen or fifteenhundred other members of a section. But what better proof can we havethat if France was to be delivered from restored feudalism and foreignspoliation, the momentous task must be performed by those who had senseto discern the awful peril, and energy to encounter it?

The Girondins had made their incapacity plain. The execution of the Kinghad filled them with alarm, and with hatred against the ruder and morerobust party who had forced that startling act of vengeance upon them. Puny social disgusts prevented them from co-operating with Danton orwith Robespierre. Prussia and Austria were not more redoubtable or morehateful to them than was Paris, and they wasted, in futilerecriminations about the September massacres or the alleged peculationsof municipal officers, the time and the energy that should have beendevoted without let or interruption to the settlement of theadministration and the repulse of the foe. It is impossible to think ofsuch fine characters as Vergniaud or Madame Roland without admiration, or of their untimely fate without pity. But the deliverance of a peoplebeset by strong and implacable enemies could not wait on mere goodmanners and fastidious sentiments, when these comely things were incompany with the most stupendous want of foresight ever shown by apolitical party. How can we measure the folly of men who so missed theconditions of the problem as to cry out in the Convention itself, almostwithin earshot of the Jacobin Club, that if any insult were offered tothe national representation, the departments would rise, 'Paris would beannihilated; and men would come to search on the banks of the Seinewhether such a city had ever existed!' It was to no purpose that Dantonurgently rebuked the senseless animosity with which the Right pouredincessant malediction on the Left, and the wild shrieking hate withwhich the Left retaliated on the Right. The battle was to the death, andit was the Girondins who first menaced their political foes withvengeance and the guillotine. As it happened, the treason of Dumouriezand their own ineptitude destroyed them before revenge was within reach. Such a consummation was fortunate for their country. It was theGirondins whose want of union and energy had by the middle of 1793brought France to distraction and imminent ruin. It was a short year ofJacobin government that by the summer of 1794 had welded the nationtogether again, and finally conquered the invasion. The city of theSeine had once more shown itself what it had been for nine centuries, ever since the days of Odo, Count of Paris and first King of the French, not merely a capital, but France itself, 'its living heart and surestbulwark. '

The immediate instrument of so rapid and extraordinary an achievementwas the Committee of Public Safety. The French have never shown theirquick genius for organisation with more triumphant vigour. While theGirondins were still powerful, nine members of the Convention had beenconstituted an executive committee, April 6, 1793. They were in fact akind of permanent cabinet, with practical irresponsibility. In thesummer of 1793 the number was increased from nine to twelve, and thesetwelve were the centre of the revolutionary government. They fell intothree groups. First, there were the scientific or practicaladministrators, of whom the most eminent was Carnot. Next came thedirectors of internal policy, the pure revolutionists, headed by Billaudde Varennes. Finally, there was a trio whose business it was totranslate action into the phrases of revolutionary policy. This famousgroup was Robespierre, Couthon, and Saint Just. 

Besides the Committee of Public Safety there was another chiefgovernmental committee, that of General Security. Its functions weremainly connected with the police, the arrests, and the prisons, but inall serious affairs the two Committees deliberated in common. There werealso fourteen other groups of various size, taken from the Convention;they applied themselves with admirable zeal, and usually not with morezeal than skill, to schemes of public instruction, of finance, oflegislation, of the administration of justice, and a host of other civilreforms, of all of which Napoleon Bonaparte was by and by to reap thecredit. These bodies completed the civil revolution, which theConstituent and the Legislative Assemblies had left so mischievouslyincomplete that, as soon as ever the Convention had assembled, it wasbesieged by a host of petitioners praying them to explain and to pursuethe abolition of the old feudal rights. Everything had still been leftuncertain in men's minds, even upon that greatest of all therevolutionary questions. The feudal division of the committee of generallegislation had in this eleventh hour to decide innumerable issues, fromthose of the widest practical importance, down to the prayer of a remotecommune to be relieved from the charge of maintaining a certain mortuarylamp which had been a matter of seignorial obligation. The work done bythe radical jurisconsults was never undone. It was the great anddurable reward of the struggle. And we have to remember that theseindustrious and efficient bodies, as well as all other public bodies andfunctionaries whatever, were placed by the definite revolutionaryconstitution of 1793 under the direct orders of the Committee of PublicSafety. 

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It is hardly possible even now for any one who exults in the memory ofthe great deliverance of a brilliant and sociable people, to standunmoved before the walls of that palace which Philibert Delorme rearedfor Catherine de' Medici, and which was thrown into ruin by the madnessof a band of desperate men in our own days. Lewis had walked forth fromthe Tuileries on the fatal morning of the Tenth of August, holding hischildren by the hand, and lightly noticing, as he traversed the gardens, how early that year the leaves were falling. Lewis had by this timefollowed the fallen leaves into nothingness. The palace of the kings wasnow styled the Palace of the Nation, and the new republic carried on itswork surrounded by the outward associations of the old monarchy. TheConvention after the spring of 1793 held its sittings in what hadformerly been the palace theatre. Fierce men from the Faubourgs of St. Antoine and St. Marceau, and fiercer women from the markets, shoutedsavage applause or menace from galleries, where not so long ago theItalian buffoons had amused the perpetual leisure of the finest ladiesand proudest grandees of France. The Committee of General Securityoccupied the Pavillon de Marsan, looking over a dingy space that theconqueror at Rivoli afterwards made the most dazzling street in Europe. The Committee of Public Safety sat in the Pavillon de Flore, at theopposite end of the Tuileries on the river bank. The approaches wereprotected by guns and by a bodyguard, while inside there flitted to andfro a cloud of familiars, who have been compared by the enemies of thegreat Committee to the mutes of the court of the Grand Turk. Any one whohad business with this awful body had to grope his way along gloomycorridors, that were dimly lighted by a single lamp at either end. Theroom in which the Committee sat round a table of green cloth wasincongruously gay with the clocks, the bronzes, the mirrors, thetapestries, of the ruined court. The members met at eight in the morningand worked until one; from one to four they attended the sitting of theConvention. In the evening they met again, and usually sat until nightwas far advanced. It was no wonder if their hue became cadaverous, theireyes hollow and bloodshot, their brows stern, their glance preoccupiedand sinister. Between ten and eleven every evening a sombre piece ofbusiness was transacted, which has half effaced in the memory ofposterity all the heroic industry of the rest of the twenty-four hours. It was then that Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor, brought anaccount of his day's labour; how the revolutionary tribunal was working, how many had been convicted and how many acquitted, how large or howsmall had been the batch of the guillotine since the previous night. Across the breadth of the gardens, beyond their trees and fountains, stood the Monster itself, with its cruel symmetry, its colour as of theblood of the dead, its unheeding knife, neutral as the Fates. 

Robespierre has been held responsible for all the violences of therevolutionary government, and his position on the Committee appeared tobe exceedingly strong. It was, however, for a long time much less strongin reality than it seemed: all depended upon successfully playing offone force against another, and at the same time maintaining himself atthe centre of the see-saw. Robespierre was the literary and rhetoricalmember of the band; he was the author of the strident manifestoes inwhich Europe listened with exasperation to the audacious hopes andunfaltering purpose of the new France. This had the effect of investinghim in the eyes of foreign nations with supreme and undisputed authorityover the government. The truth is, that Robespierre was both dislikedand despised by his colleagues. They thought of him as a mere maker ofuseful phrases; he in turn secretly looked down upon them, as the manwho has a doctrine and a system in his head always looks down upon theman who lives from hand to mouth. If the Committee had been in the placeof a government which has no opposition to fear, Robespierre would havebeen one of its least powerful members. But although the government wasstrong, there were at least three potent elements of opposition evenwithin the ranks of the dominant revolutionary party itself. 

Three bodies in Paris were, each of them, the centre of an influencethat might at any moment become the triumphant rival of the Committee ofPublic Safety. These bodies were, first, the Convention; second, theCommune of Paris; and thirdly, the Jacobin Club. The jealousy thusexisting outside the Committee would have made any failure instantlydestructive. At one moment, at the end of 1793, it was only thesurrender of Toulon that saved the Committee from a hostile motion inthe Convention, and such a motion would have sent half of them to theguillotine. They were reviled by the extreme party who ruled at the TownHall for not carrying the policy of extermination far enough. They werereproached by Danton and his powerful section for carrying that policytoo far. They were discredited by the small band of intriguers, likeBazire, who identified government with peculation. Finally, they werehaunted by the shadow of a fear, which events were by and by to proveonly too substantial, lest one of their military agents on the frontiershould make himself their master. The key to the struggle of thefactions between the winter of 1793 and the revolution of the summer of1794 is the vigorous resolve of the governing Committees not to partwith power. The drama is one of the most exciting in the history offaction; it abounds in rapid turns and unexpected shifts, upon which thestudent may spend many a day and many a night, and after all he isforced to leave off in despair of threading an accurate way through thelabyrinth of passion and intrigue. The broad traits of the situation, however, are tolerably simple. The difficulty was to find a principle ofgovernment which the people could be induced to accept. 'The rights ofmen and the new principles of liberty and equality, ' Burke said, 'werevery unhandy instruments for those who wished to establish a system oftranquillity and order. The factions, ' he added with fierce sarcasm, 'were to accomplish the purposes of order, morality, and submission tothe laws, from the principles of atheism, profligacy, and sedition. Theyendeavoured to establish distinctions, by the belief of which they hopedto keep the spirit of murder safely bottled up and sealed for their ownpurposes, without endangering themselves by the fumes of the poisonwhich they prepared for their enemies. ' This is a ferocious andpassionate version, but it is substantially not an unreal account of theposition. 

Upon one point all parties agreed, and that was the necessity offounding the government upon force, and force naturally meant Terror. Their plea was that of Dido to Ilioneus and the stormbeaten sons ofDardanus, when they complained that her people had drawn the sword uponthem, and barbarously denied the hospitality of the sandy shore:--

 Res dura et regni novitas me talia cogunt Moliri. 

And that pithy chapter in Machiavelli's _Prince_ which treats of crueltyand clemency, and whether it be better to be loved or feared, anticipates the defence of the Terrorists, in the maxim that for a newprince it is impossible to avoid the name of cruel, because all newstates abound in many perils. The difference arose on the question whenTerror should be considered to have done as much of its work as it couldbe expected to do. This difference again was connected with differenceof conception as to the type of the society which was ultimately toemerge from the existing chaos. Billaud-Varennes, the guiding spirit ofthe Committees, was without any conception of this kind. He was a man offorce pure and simple. Danton was equally untouched by dreams of socialtransformation; his philosophy, so far as he had a definite philosophy, was, in spite of one or two inconsistent utterances, materialistic: andmaterialism, when it takes root in a sane, perspicacious, and indulgentcharacter, as in the case of Danton, and, to take a better-knownexample, in the case of Jefferson, usually leads to a sound and positivetheory of politics; chimeras have no place in it, though a rationalsocial hope has the first place of all. Neither Danton nor Billaudexpected a millennium; their only aim was to shape France into acoherent political personality, and the war between them turned upon thepolicy of prolonging the Terror after the frontiers had been saved andthe risings in the provinces put down. There were, however, two partieswho took the literature of the century in earnest; they thought that thehour had struck for translating, one of them, the sentimentalism ofRousseau, the other of them, the rationality of Voltaire and Diderot, into terms of politics that should form the basis of a new social life. The strife between the faction of Robespierre and the faction ofChaumette was the reproduction, under the shadow of the guillotine, ofthe great literary strife of a quarter of a century before between JeanJacques and the writers whom he contemptuously styled Holbachians. Thebattle of the books had become a battle between bands of infuriated men. The struggle between Hébert and Chaumette and the Common Council ofParis on the one part, and the Committee and Robespierre on the other, was the concrete form of the deepest controversy that lies before modernsociety. Can the social union subsist without a belief in God? Chaumetteanswered Yes, and Robespierre cried No. Robespierre followed Rousseau inthinking that any one who should refuse to recognise the existence of aGod, should be exiled as a monster devoid of the faculties of virtue andsociability. Chaumette followed Diderot, and Diderot told Samuel Romillyin 1783 that belief in God, as well as submission to kings, would be atan end all over the world in a very few years. The Hébertists might havetaken for their motto Diderot's shocking couplet, if they could haveknown it, about using

 Les entrailles du prêtre Au défaut d'un cordon pour étrangler les rois. 

The theists and the atheists, Chaumette and Robespierre, each of themaccepted the doctrine that it was in the power of the armed legislatorto impose any belief and any rites he pleased upon the country at hisfeet. The theism or the atheism of the new France depended, as theythought, on the issue of the war for authority between the Hébertists inthe Common Council of Paris, and the Committee of Public Safety. Thatwas the religious side of the attitude of the government to theopposition, and it is the side that possesses most historic interest. Billaud cared very little for religion in any way; his quarrel with theCommune and with Hébert was political. What Robespierre's drift appearsto have been, was to use the political animosity of the Committee as ameans of striking foes, against whom his own animosity was not onlypolitical but religious also. 

It would doubtless show a very dull apprehension of the violence andconfusion of the time, to suppose that even Robespierre, with all hislove for concise theories, was accustomed to state his aim to himselfwith the definite neatness in which it appears when reduced to literarystatement. Pedant as he was, he was yet enough of a politician to seethe practical urgency of restoring material order, whatever spiritualbelief or disbelief might accompany it. The prospect of a rallying pointfor material order was incessantly changing; and Robespierre turned todifferent quarters in search of it almost from week to week. He was onlyable to exert a certain limited authority over his colleagues in thegovernment, by virtue of his influence over the various sections ofpossible opposition, and this was a moral, and not an official, influence. It was acquired not by marked practical gifts, for in truthRobespierre did not possess them, but by his good character, by hisrhetoric, and by the skill with which he kept himself prominently beforethe public eye. The effective seat of his power, notwithstanding manylimits and incessant variations, was the Jacobin Club. There a speechfrom him threw his listeners into ecstasies, that have beendisrespectfully compared to the paroxysms of Jansenist convulsionaries, or the hysterics of Methodist negroes on a cotton plantation. Wenaturally think of those grave men who a few years before had foundedthe republic in America. Jefferson served with Washington in theVirginian legislature and with Franklin in Congress, and he afterwardssaid that he never heard either of them speak ten minutes at a time;while John Adams declared that he never heard Jefferson utter threesentences together. Of Robespierre it is stated on good authority thatfor eighteen months there was not a single evening on which he did notmake to the assembled Jacobins at least one speech, and that never ashort one. 

Strange as it may seem, Robespierre's credit with this grim assembly wasdue to his truly Philistine respectability and to his literary faculty. He figured as the philosopher and bookman of the party: the mosticonoclastic politicians are usually willing to respect the scholar, provided they are sure of his being on their side. Robespierre had fromthe first discountenanced the fantastic caprices of some too excitableallies. He distrusted the noisy patriots of the middle class, whocurried favour with the crowd by clothing themselves in coarse garments, clutching a pike, and donning the famous cap of red woollen, which hadbeen the emblem of the emancipation of a slave in ancient Rome. Onenight at the Jacobin Club, Robespierre mounted the tribune, dressed withhis usual elaborate neatness, and still wearing powder in his hair. Anonlooker unceremoniously planted on the orator's head the red capdemanded by revolutionary etiquette. Robespierre threw the sacred symbolon the ground with a severe air, and then proceeded with a discourse ofmuch austerity. Not that he was averse to a certain seemly decoration, or to the embodiment of revolutionary sentiment by means of a symbolismthat strikes our cooler imagination as rather puerile. He was as readyas others to use the arts of the theatre for the liturgy of patriots. One of the most touching of all the minor dramatic incidents of theRevolution was the death of Barra. This was a child of thirteen whoenrolled himself as a drummer, and marched with the Blues to suppressthe rebel Whites in La Vendée. One day he advanced too close to theenemy's post, intrepidly beating the charge. He was surrounded, but thepeasant soldiers were loth to strike, 'Cry _Long live the King!_' theyshouted, 'or else death!' 'Long live the Republic!' was the poor littlehero's answer, as a ball pierced his heart. Robespierre described theincident to the Convention, and amid prodigious enthusiasm demanded thatthe body of the young martyr of liberty should be transported to thePantheon with special pomp, and that David, the artist of theRevolution, should be charged with the duty of devising and embellishingthe festival. As it happened, the arrangements were made for theceremony to take place on the Tenth of Thermidor--a day on whichRobespierre and all Paris were concerned about a celebration of bloodierimport. Thermidor, however, was still far off; and the red sun ofJacobin enthusiasm seemed as if it would shine unclouded for ever. 

Even at the Jacobins, however, popular as he was, Robespierre felt everyinstant the necessity of walking cautiously. He was as far removed aspossible from that position of Dictator which some historians with awearisome iteration persist in ascribing to him, even at the moment whenthey are enumerating the defeats which the party of Hébert was able toinflict upon him in the very bosom of the Mother Club itself. They makehim the sanguinary dictator in one sentence, and the humiliatedintriguer in the next. The latter is much the more correct account ofthe two, if we choose to call a man an intriguer who was honestlyanxious to suppress what he considered a wicked faction, and yet hadneed of some dexterity to keep his own head upon his shoulders. 

 * * * * *

In the winter of 1793 the Municipal party, guided by Hébert andChaumette, made their memorable attempt to extirpate Christianity inFrance. The doctrine of D'Holbach's supper-table had for a short spacethe arm of flesh and the sword of the temporal power on its side. It wasthe first appearance of dogmatic atheism in Europe as a political force. This makes it one of the most remarkable moments in the Revolution, justas it makes the Revolution itself the most remarkable moment in modernhistory. The first political demonstration of atheism was attended bysome of the excesses, the folly, the extravagances that stained thegrowth of Christianity. On the whole it is a very mild story comparedwith the atrocities of the Jewish records or the crimes of Catholicism. The worst charge against the party of Chaumette is that they wereintolerant, and the charge is deplorably true; but this charge cannotlie in the mouth of persecuting churches. 

Historical recriminations, however, are not very edifying. It isperfectly fair when Catholics talk of the atheist Terror, to rejoin thatthe retainers of Anjou and Montpensier slew more men and women on thefirst day of the Saint Bartholomew than perished in Paris through theYears I. And II. But the retort does us no good beyond the region ofdialectic; it rather brings us down to the level of the poor sectarieswhom it crushes. Let us raise ourselves into clearer air. The fault ofthe atheist is that they knew no better than to borrow the maxims of thechurchmen; and even those who agree with the dogmatic denials of theatheists--if such there be--ought yet to admit that the mere change fromsuperstition to reason is a small gain, if the conclusions of reason arestill to be enforced by the instruments of superstition. Our opinionsare less important than the spirit and temper with which they possessus, and even good opinions are worth very little unless we hold them ina broad, intelligent, and spacious way. Now some of the opinions ofChaumette were full of enlightenment and hope. He had a generous andvivid faith in humanity, and he showed the natural effect of abandoningbelief in another life by his energetic interest in arrangements forimproving the lot of man in this life. But it would be far better toshare the superstitious opinions of a virtuous and benignant priest likethe Bishop in Victor Hugo's _Misérables_, than to hold those goodopinions of Chaumette as he held them, with a rancorous intolerance, areckless disregard of the rights and feelings of others, and a shallowforgetfulness of all that great and precious part of our natures thatlies out of the immediate domain of the logical understanding. One canunderstand how an honest man would abhor the darkness and tyranny of theChurch. But then to borrow the same absolutism in the interests of newlight, was inevitably to bring the new light into the same abhorrenceas had befallen the old system of darkness. And this is exactly whathappened. In every family where a mother sought to have her childbaptized, or where sons and daughters sought to have the dying spirit ofthe old consoled by the last sacrament, there sprang up a bitter enemyto the government which had closed the churches and proscribed thepriests. 

How could a society whose spiritual life had been nourished in thesolemn mysticism of the Middle Ages, suddenly turn to embrace a gaudypaganism? The common self-respect of humanity was outraged by apostatepriests who, whether under the pressure of fear of Chaumette, or in avery superfluity of folly and ecstasy of degradation, hastened toproclaim the charlatanry of their past lives, as they filed before theConvention, led by the Archbishop of Paris, and accompanied by rudeacolytes bearing piles of the robes and the vessels of silver and goldwith which they had once served their holy offices. 'Our enemies, 'Voltaire had said, 'have always on their side the fat of the land, thesword, the strong box, and the _canaille_. ' For a moment all theseforces were on the other side, and it is deplorable to think that theywere as much abused by their new masters as by the old. The explanationis that the destructive party had been brought up in the schools of theecclesiastical party, and their work was a mere outbreak of mutiny, nota grave and responsible attempt to lead France to a worthier faith. If, as Chaumette believed, mankind are the only Providence of men, surelyin that faith more than in any other are we bound to be very solicitousnot to bring the violent hand of power on any of the spiritualacquisitions of the race, and very patient in dealing with the slownessof the common people to leave their outworn creeds. 

Instead of defying the Church by the theatrical march of the Goddess ofReason under the great sombre arches of the Cathedral of Our Lady, Chaumette should have found comfort in a firm calculation of theconditions. 'You, ' he might have said to the priests, --'you have sodebilitated the minds of men and women by your promises and your dreams, that many a generation must come and go before Europe can throw off theyoke of your superstition. But we promise you that they shall begenerations of strenuous battle. We give you all the advantages that youcan get from the sincerity and pious worth of the good and simple amongyou. We give you all that the bad among you may get by resort to thepoisoned weapons of your profession and its traditions, --its bribes tomental indolence, its hypocritical affectations in the pulpit, itstyranny in the closet, its false speciousness in the world, its menaceat the deathbed. With all these you may do your worst, and stillhumanity will escape you; still the conscience of the race will riseaway from you; still the growth of brighter ideals and a nobler purposewill go on, leaving ever further and further behind them your dwarfedfinality and leaden moveless stereotype. We shall pass you by on yourflank; your fieriest darts will only spend themselves on air. We willnot attack you as Voltaire did; we will not exterminate you; we shallexplain you. History will place your dogma in its class, above or belowa hundred competing dogmas, exactly as the naturalist classifies hisspecies. From being a conviction, it will sink to a curiosity; frombeing the guide to millions of human lives, it will dwindle down to achapter in a book. As History explains your dogma, so Science will dryit up; the conception of law will silently make the conception of thedaily miracle of your altars seem impossible; the mental climate willgradually deprive your symbols of their nourishment, and men will turntheir backs on your system, not because they have confuted it, butbecause, like witchcraft or astrology, it has ceased to interest them. The great ship of your Church, once so stout and fair and well ladenwith good destinies, is become a skeleton ship; it is a phantom hulk, with warped planks and sere canvas, and you who work it are no more thanghosts of dead men, and at the hour when you seem to have reached thebay, down your ship will sink like lead or like stone to the deepestbottom. '

Alas, the speculation of the century had not rightly attuned men's mindsto this firm confidence in the virtue of liberty, sounding like a bellthrough all distractions. None of these high things were said. Thetemples were closed, the sacred symbols defiled, the priestsmaltreated, the worshippers dispersed. The Commune of Paris imitated thepolicy of the King of France who revoked the Edict of Nantes, anddemocratic atheism parodied the dragonnades of absolutist Catholicism. 

 * * * * *

Robespierre was unutterably outraged by the proceedings of the atheists. They perplexed him as a politician intent upon order, and they afflictedhim sorely as an ardent disciple of the Savoyard Vicar. Hébert, however, was so strong that it needed some courage to attack him, nor didRobespierre dare to withstand him to the face. But he did not flinchfrom making an energetic assault upon atheism and the excesses of itspartisans. His admirers usually count his speech of the Twenty-first ofNovember one of the most admirable of his oratorical successes. TheSphinx still sits inexorable at our gates, and his words have lost noneof their interest. 'Every philosopher and every individual, ' he said, 'may adopt whatever opinion he pleases about atheism. Any one who wishesto make such an opinion into a crime is an insensate; but the public manor the legislator who should adopt such a system, would be a hundredtimes more insensate still. The National Convention abhors it. TheConvention is not the author of a scheme of metaphysics. It was not tono purpose that it published the Declaration of the Rights of Man inpresence of the Supreme Being. I shall be told perhaps that I have anarrow intelligence, that I am a man of prejudice, and a fanatic. Ihave already said that I spoke neither as an individual nor as aphilosopher with a system, but as a representative of the people. _Atheism is aristocratic. The idea of a great being who watches overoppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is essentially theidea of the people. _ This is the sentiment of Europe and the Universe;it is the sentiment of the French nation. That people is attachedneither to priests, nor to superstition, nor to ceremonies; it isattached only to worship in itself, or in other words to the idea of anincomprehensible Power, the terror of wrongdoers, the stay and comfortof virtue, to which it delights to render words of homage that are allso many anathemas against injustice and triumphant crime. '

This is Robespierre's favourite attitude, the priest posing asstatesman. Like others, he declares the Supreme Power incomprehensible, and then describes him in terms of familiar comprehension. He firstdeclares atheism an open choice, and then he brands it with the mostodious epithet in the accepted vocabulary of the hour. Danton followedpractically the same line, though saying much less about it. 'IfGreece, ' he said in the Convention, 'had its Olympian games, France tooshall solemnise her sans-culottid days. The people will have highfestivals; they will offer incense to the Supreme Being, to the masterof nature; for we never intended to annihilate the reign of superstitionin order to set up the reign of atheism. . . . If we have not honoured thepriest of error and fanaticism, neither do we wish to honour the priestof incredulity: we wish to serve the people. I demand that there shallbe an end of these anti-religious masquerades in the Convention. '

There was an end of the masquerading, but the Hébertists still kepttheir ground. Danton, Robespierre, and the Committee were all equallyimpotent against them for some months longer. The revolutionary forcehad been too strong to be resisted by any government since the Parisinsurgents had carried both King and Assembly in triumph from Versaillesin the October of 1789. It was now too strong for those who had begun tostrive with all their might to build a new government out of theagencies that had shattered the old to pieces. For some months thebattle which had been opened by Robespierre's remonstrance againstatheistic intolerance, degenerated into a series of masked skirmishes. The battle-ground of rival principles was overshadowed by the balefulwings of the genius of demonic Hate. _Vexilla regis prodeunt inferni_;the banners of the King of the Pit came forth. The scene at theCordeliers for a time became as frantic as a Council of the Early Churchsettling the true composition of the Holy Trinity. Or it recalls thefierce and bloody contentions between Demos and Oligarchy in an oldGreek town. We think of the day in the harbour of Corcyra when theAthenian admiral who had come to deliver the people, sailed out to meetthe Spartan enemy, and on turning round to see if his Corcyrean allieswere following, saw them following indeed, but the crew of every shipstriving in enraged conflict with one another. Collot D'Herbois had comeback in hot haste from Lyons, where, along with Fouché, he had done hisbest to carry out the decree of the Convention, that not one stone ofthe city should be left on the top of another, and that even its veryname should cease from the lips of men. Carrier was recalled fromNantes, where his feats of ingenious massacre had rivalled the exploitsof the cruellest and maddest of the Roman Emperors. The presence ofthese men of blood gave new courage and resolution to the Hébertists. Though the alliance was informal, yet as against Danton, CamilleDesmoulins, and the rest of the Indulgents, as well as againstRobespierre, they made common cause. 

Camille Desmoulins attacked Hébert in successive numbers of a journalthat is perhaps the one truly literary monument of this stage of therevolution. Hébert retaliated by impugning the patriotism of Desmoulinsin the Club, and the unfortunate wit, notwithstanding the efforts ofRobespierre on his behalf, was for a while turned out of the sacredprecincts. The power of the extreme faction was shown in relation toother prominent members of the party whom they loved to stigmatise bythe deadly names of Indulgent and Moderantist. Even Danton himself wasattacked (December 1793), and the integrity of his patriotism broughtinto question. Robespierre made an energetic defence of his great rivalin the hierarchy of revolution, and the defence saved Danton from themortal ignominy of expulsion from the communion of the orthodox. On theother hand, Anacharsis Clootz, that guileless ally of the party ofdelirium, was less fortunate. Robespierre assailed the cosmopolitan forbeing a German baron, for having four thousand pounds a year, and forstriking his sans-culottism some notes higher than the regular pitch. Even M. Louis Blanc calls this an iniquity, and sets it down as theworst page in Robespierre's life. Others have described Robespierre asstruck at this time by the dire malady of kings--hatred of the Idea. Itseems, however, a hard saying that devotion to the Idea is to extinguishcommon sense. Clootz, notwithstanding his simple and disinterestedcharacter, and his possession of some rays of the modern illumination, was one of the least sane of all the men who in the exultation of theirsilly gladness were suddenly caught up by that great wheel of fire. Allwe can say is that Robespierre's bitter demeanour towards Clootz wasungenerous; but then this is only natural in him. Robespierre oftenclothed cool policy in the semblance of clemency, but I cannot hear inany phrase he ever used, or see in any measure he ever proposed, themark of true generosity; of kingliness of spirit, not a trace. He had noelement of ready and cordial propitiation, an element that can never bewanting in the greatest leaders in time of storm. If he resisted theatrocious proposals to put Madame Elizabeth to death, he was thinkingnot of mercy or justice, but of the mischievous effect that herexecution would have upon the public opinion of Europe, and he was sounmanly as to speak of her as _la méprisable soeur de Louis XVI_. Sucha phrase is the disclosure of an abject stratum in his soul. 

Yet this did not prevent him from seeing and denouncing the bloodyextravagances of the Proconsuls, the representatives of Parisianauthority in the provinces; nor from standing firm against the executionof the Seventy-Three, who had been bold enough to question the purgationof the National Convention on the Thirty-first of May. But the return ofCollot d'Herbois made the situation more intricate. Collot was by hisposition the ally of Billaud, and to attack him, therefore, was toattack the most powerful member of the Committee of Public Safety. Billaud was too formidable. He was always the impersonation of the rudergenius of the Revolution, and the incarnation of the philosophy of theTerror, not as a delirium, but as a piece of deliberate policy. Hispale, sober, and concentrated physiognomy seemed a perpetual menace. Hehad no gifts of speech, but his silence made people shudder, like thesilence of the thunder when the tempest rages at its height. It was saidby contemporaries that if Vadier was a hyæna, Barère a jackal, andRobespierre a cat, Billaud was a tiger. 

The cat perceived that he was in danger of not having the tiger, jackal, and hyæna, on his side. Robespierre, in whom spasmodical courage andtimidity ruled by rapid turns, began to suspect that he had beenpremature; and a convenient illness, which some suppose to have beenfeigned, excused his withdrawal for some weeks from a scene where hefelt that he could no longer see clear. We cannot doubt that both he andDanton were perfectly assured that the anarchic party must unavoidablyroll headlong into the abyss. But the hour of doom was uncertain. Tomake a mistake in the right moment, to hurry the crisis, was instantdeath. Robespierre was a more adroit calculator than Danton. We must notconfound his thin and querulous reserve with that stout and deep-browedpatience, which may imply as superb a fortitude, and may demand as muchiron control in a statesman, as the most heroic exploits of politicalenergy. But his habit of waiting on force, instead of, like the other, taking the initiative with force, had trained his sight. The mixture ofastuteness with his scruple, of egoistic policy with his stiffness fordoctrine, gave him an advantage over Danton, that made his life worthexactly three months' more purchase than Danton's. It has been said thatSpinozism or Transcendentalism in poetic production becomesMachiavellism in reflection: for the same reasons we may always expectsentimentalism in theory to become under the pressure of action a veryself-protecting guile. Robespierre's mind was not rich nor flexibleenough for true statesmanship, and it is a grave mistake to suppose thatthe various cunning tacks in which his career abounds, were any sign ofgenuine versatility or resource or political growth and expansion. Theywere, in fact, the resort of a man whose nerves were weaker than hisvolition. Robespierre was a kind of spinster. Force of head did notmatch his spiritual ambition. He was not, we repeat, a coward in anycommon sense; in that case he would have remained quiet among thecroaking frogs of the Marsh, and by and by have come to hold a portfoliounder the first Consul. He did not fear death, and he envied withconsuming envy those to whom nature had given the qualities ofinitiative. But his nerves always played him false. The consciousness ofhaving to resolve to take a decided step alone, was the precursor of afit of trembling. His heart did not fail, but he could not control theparched voice, nor the twitching features, not the ghastly palsy ofinner misgiving. In this respect Robespierre recalls a more illustriousman; we think of Cicero tremblingly calling upon the Senate to decidefor him whether he should order the execution of the Catilinarianconspirators. It is to be said, however, in his favour that he had theart, which Cicero lacked, to hide his pusillanimity. Robespierre knewhimself, and did his best to keep his own secret. 

His absence during the final crisis of the anarchic party allowed eventsto ripen, without committing him to that initiative in dangerous actionwhich he had dreaded on the Tenth of August, as he dreaded it on everyother decisive day of this burning time. The party of the Communebecame more and more daring in their invectives against the Conventionand the Committees. At length they proclaimed open insurrection. ButParis was cold, and opinion was divided. In the night of the Thirteenthof March, Hébert, Chaumette, Clootz, were arrested. The next dayRobespierre recovered sufficiently to appear at the Jacobin Club. Hejoined his colleagues of the Committee of Public Safety in striking theblow. On the Twenty-fourth of March the Ultra-Revolutionist leaders werebeheaded. 

The first bloody breach in the Jacobin ranks was speedily followed bythe second. The Right wing of the opposition to the Committee soonfollowed the Left down the ways to dusty death, and the execution of theAnarchists only preceded by a week the arrest of the Moderates. When theseizure of Danton had once before been discussed in the Committee, Robespierre resisted the proposal violently. We have already seen how hedefended Danton at the Jacobin Club, when the Club underwent the processof purification in the winter. What produced this sudden tack? How cameRobespierre to assent in March to a violence which he had angrilydiscountenanced in February? There had been no change in the policy orattitude of Danton himself. The military operations against the domesticand foreign enemies were no sooner fairly in the way of success, thanDanton began to meditate in serious earnest the consolidation of arepublican system of law and justice. He would fain have stayed theTerror. 'Let us leave something, ' he said, 'to the guillotine ofopinion. ' He aided, no doubt, in the formation of the RevolutionaryTribunal, but this was exactly in harmony with his usual policy ofcontrolling popular violence without alienating the strength of popularsympathy. The process of the tribunal was rough and summary, but it wasfairer--until Robespierre's Law of Prairial--than people usuallysuppose, and it was the very temple of the goddess of Justice herselfcompared with the September massacres. 'Let us prove ourselvesterrible, ' Danton said, 'to relieve the people from the necessity ofbeing so. ' His activity had been incessant in urging and superintendingthe great levies against the foreigner; he had gone repeatedly ondistant and harassing expeditions, as the representative of theConvention at the camps on the frontier. In the midst of all this hefound time to press forward measures for the instruction of the young, and for the due appointment of judges, and his head was full of ideasfor the construction of a permanent executive council. It was this whichmade him eager for a cessation of the method of Terror, and it was thiswhich made the Committee of Public Safety his implacable enemy. 

Why, then, did Robespierre, who also passed as a man of order andhumanity, not continue to support Danton after the suppression of theHébertists, as he had supported him before? The common and facile answeris that he was moved by a malignant desire to put a rival out of theway. On the whole, the evidence seems to support Napoleon's opinion thatRobespierre was incapable of voting for the death of anybody in theworld on grounds of personal enmity. And his acquiescence in the ruin ofDanton is intelligible enough on the grounds of selfish policy. TheCommittee hated Danton for the good reason that he had openly attackedthem, and his cry for clemency was an inflammatory and dangerous protestagainst their system. Now Robespierre, rightly or wrongly, had made uphis mind that the Committee was the instrument by which, and which only, he could work out his own vague schemes of power and reconstruction. And, in any case, how could he resist the Committee? The famousinsurrectionary force of Paris, which Danton had been the first toorganise against a government, had just been chilled by the fall of theHébertists. Least of all could this force be relied upon to rise indefence of the very chief whose every word for many weeks past had beena protest against the Communal leaders. In separating himself from theUltras, Danton had cut off the great reservoir of his peculiar strength. 

It may be said that the Convention was the proper centre of resistanceto the designs of the Committee, and that if Danton and Robespierre hadunited their forces in the Convention they would have defeated Billaudand his allies. This seems to us more than doubtful. The Committee hadacquired an immense preponderance over the Convention. They had beeneminently successful in the immense tasks imposed upon them. They hadthe prestige not only of being the government--so great a thing in acountry that had just emerged from the condition of a centralisedmonarchy; they had also the prestige of being a government that had doneits work triumphantly. We are now in March. In July we shall find thatRobespierre adopted the very policy that we are now discussing, ofplaying off the Convention against the Committee. In July that policyended in his headlong fall. Why should it have been any more successfulfour months earlier?

What we may say is, that Robespierre was bound in all morality to defendDanton in the Convention at every hazard. Possibly so; but then to runrisks for chivalry's sake was not in Robespierre's nature, and no mancan climb out beyond the limitations of his own character. His narrowhead and thin blood and instable nerve, his calculating humour and hisfrigid egoism, disinclined him to all games of chance. His apologistshave sought to put a more respectable colour on his abandonment ofDanton. The precisian, they say, disapproved of Danton's lax andheedless courses. Danton said to him one day:--'What do I care? Publicopinion is a strumpet, and posterity a piece of nonsense. ' How shouldthe puritanical lawyer endure such cynicism as this? And Dantondelighted in inflicting these coarse shocks. Again, Danton had givenvarious gross names of contempt to Saint Just. Was Robespierre not tofeel insults offered to the ablest and most devoted of his lieutenants?What was more important than all, the acclamations with which thepartisans of reaction greeted the fall of the Ultras, made it necessaryto give instant and unmistakable notice to the foes of the Revolutionthat the goddess of the scorching eye and fiery hand still grasped theaxe of her vengeance. 

These are pleas invented after the fact. All goes to show thatRobespierre was really moved by nothing more than his invariable dreadof being left behind, of finding himself on the weaker side, of notseeming practical and political enough. And having made up his mind thatthe stronger party was bent on the destruction of the Dantonists, hebecame fiercer than Billaud himself. It is constantly seen that thewaverer, of nervous atrabiliar constitution, no sooner overcomes theagony of irresolution, than he flings himself on his object with avindictive tenacity that seems to repay him for all the moralhumiliation inflicted on him by his stifled doubts. He redeems theslowness of his approach by the fury of his spring. 'Robespierre, ' saysM. D'Héricault, 'precipitated himself to the front of the opinion thatwas yelling against his friends of yesterday. In order to keep his usualpost in the van of the Revolution, in order to secure the advantage tohis own popularity of an execution which the public voice seemed todemand, he came forward as the author of that execution, though only theday before he had hesitated about its utility, and though it was, intruth far less useful to him than it proved to be to his futureantagonists. '

Robespierre first alarmed Danton's friends by assuming a certain icycoldness of manner, and by some menacing phrases about the faction ofthe so-called Moderates. Danton had gone, as he often did, to his nativevillage of Arcis-sur-Aube, to seek repose and a little clearness ofsight in the night that wrapped him about. He was devoid of personalambition; he never had any humour for mere factious struggles. His, again, was the temperament of violent force, and in such types thereaction is always tremendous. The indomitable activity of the lasttwenty months had bred weariness of spirit. The nemesis of a career ofstrenuous Will in large natures is apt to be a sudden sense of the ironyof things. In Danton, as with Byron it happened afterwards, thevehemence of the revolutionary spirit was touched by this desolatingirony. His friends tried to rouse him. It is not clear that he couldhave done anything. The balance of force, after the suppression of theHébertists, was irretrievably against him, as calculation had alreadyrevealed to Robespierre. 

There are various stories of the pair having met at dinner almost on theeve of Danton's arrest, and parting with sombre disquietude on bothsides. The interview, with its champagne, its interlocutors, its play ofsinister repartee, may possibly have taken place, but the allegeddetails are plainly apocryphal. After all, 'Religion ist in der ThiereTrieb, ' says Wallenstein; 'the very savage drinks not with the victim, into whose breast he means to plunge a sword. ' Danton was warned thatRobespierre was plotting his arrest. 'If I thought he had the bareidea, ' said Danton with something of Gargantuan hyperbole, 'I would eathis bowels out. ' Such was the disdain with which the 'giant of themighty bone and bold emprise' thought of our meagre-hearted pedant. Thetruth is that in the stormy and distracted times of politics, andperhaps in all times, contempt is a dangerous luxury. A man may be avery poor creature, and still have a faculty for mischief. AndRobespierre had this faculty in the case of Danton. With singularbaseness, he handed over to Saint Just a collection of notes, to serveas material for the indictment which Saint Just was to present to theConvention. They comprised everything that suspicion could interpretmalignantly, from the most conspicuous acts of Danton's public life, down to the casual freedom of private discourse. 

Another infamy was to follow. After the arrest, and on the proceedingsto obtain the assent of the Convention to the trial of Danton and othersof its members, one only of their friends had the courage to rise anddemand that they should be heard at the bar. Robespierre burst out incold rage; he asked whether they had undergone so many heroicsacrifices, counting among them these acts of 'painful severity, ' onlyto fall under the yoke of a band of domineering intriguers; and he criedout impatiently that they would brook no claim of privilege, and sufferno rotten idol. The word was felicitously chosen, for the Conventiondreaded to have its independence suspected, and it dreaded this all themore because at this time its independence did not really exist. Thevote against Danton was unanimous, and the fact that it was so is thedeepest stain on the fame of this assembly. On the afternoon of theSixteenth Germinal (April 5, 1794) Paris in amazement and somestupefaction saw the once-dreaded Titan of the Mountain fast bound inthe tumbril, and faring towards the sharp-clanging knife. 'I leave itall in a frightful welter, ' Danton is reported to have said. 'Not a manof them has an idea of government. Robespierre will follow me; he isdragged down by me. Ah, better be a poor fisherman than meddle with thegoverning of men!'

 * * * * *

Let us pause for a moment over a calmer reminiscence. This was the veryday on which the virtuous and high-minded Condorcet quitted the friendlyroof that for nine months had concealed him from the search ofproscription. The same week he was found dead in his prison. WhileDanton was storming with impotent thunder before the tribunal, Condorcetwas writing those closing words of his Sketch of Human Progress, whichare always so full of strength and edification. 'How this picture of thehuman race freed from all its fetters, --withdrawn from the empire ofchance, as from that of the enemies of progress, and walking with firmand assured step in the way of truth, of virtue, and happiness, presentsto the philosopher a sight that consoles him for the errors, the crimes, the injustice, with which the earth is yet stained, and of which he isnot seldom the victim! It is in the contemplation of this picture thathe receives the reward of his efforts for the progress of reason, forthe defence of liberty. He ventures to link them with the eternal chainof the destinies of man: it is there he finds the true recompense ofvirtue, the pleasure of having done a lasting good; fate can no longerundo it, by any disastrous compensation that shall restore prejudice andbondage. This contemplation is for him a refuge, into which therecollection of his persecutors can never follow him; in which, livingin thought with man reinstated in the rights and the dignity of hisnature, he forgets man tormented and corrupted by greed, by base fear, by envy: it is here that he truly abides with his fellows, in an elysiumthat his reason has known how to create for itself, and that his lovefor humanity adorns with all purest delights. '

 * * * * *

In following the turns of the drama which was to end in the tragedy ofThermidor, we perceive that after the fall of the anarchists and thedeath of Danton, the relations between Robespierre and the Committeesunderwent a change. He, who had hitherto been on the side of government, became in turn an agency of opposition. He did this in the interest ofultimate stability, but the difference between the new position and theold is that he now distinctly associated the idea of a stable republicwith the ascendency of his own religious conceptions. How far theascendency of his own personality was involved, we have no means ofjudging. The vulgar accusation against him is that he now deliberatelyaimed at a dictatorship, and began to plot with that end in view. It isalways the most difficult thing in the world to draw a line between merearrogant egoism on the one hand, and on the other the identification ofa man's personal elevation with the success of his public cause. The twoends probably become mixed in his mind, and if the cause be a good one, it is the height of pharisaical folly to quarrel with him, because hedesires that his authority and renown shall receive some of the lustreof a far-shining triumph. What we complain of in Napoleon Bonaparte, forinstance, is not that he sought power, but that he sought it in theinterests of a coarse, brutal, and essentially unmeaning personalambition. And so of Robespierre. We need not discuss the charge that hesought to make himself master. The important thing is that his masterycould have served no great end for France; that it would have been likehimself, poor, barren, and hopelessly mediocre. And this would have beenseen on every side. France had important military tasks to performbefore her independence was assured. Robespierre hated war, and wasjealous of every victory. France was in urgent need of stablegovernment, of new laws, of ordered institutions. Robespierre never saida word to indicate that he had a single positive idea in his head on anyof these great departments. And, more than this, he was incapable ofmaking use of men who were more happily endowed than himself. He hadnever mastered that excellent observation of De Retz, that of all thequalities of a good party chief, none is so indispensable as being ableto suppress on many occasions, and to hide on all, even legitimatesuspicions. He was corroded by suspicion, and this paralyses ableservants. Finally, Robespierre had no imperial quality of soul, but onlythat very sorry imitation of it, a lively irritability. 

The base of Robespierre's schemes of social reconstruction now cameclearly into view; and what a base! An official Supreme Being, and aregulated Terror. The one was to fill up the spiritual void, and theother to satisfy all the exigencies of temporal things. It is to thecredit of Robespierre's perspicacity that he should have recognised thehuman craving for religion, but this credit is as naught when wecontemplate the jejune thing that passed for religion in his dim andnarrow understanding. Rousseau had brought a new soul into theeighteenth century by the Savoyard Vicar's Profession of Faith, the mostfervid and exalted expression of emotional deism that religiousliterature contains; vague, irrational, incoherent, cloudy; but theclouds are suffused with glowing gold. When we turn from that to thepolitical version of it in Robespierre's discourse on the relations ofreligious and moral ideas with republican principles, we feel as one whorevisits a landscape that had been made glorious to him by a summer skyand fresh liquid winds from the gates of the evening sun, only to findit dead under a gray heaven and harsh blasts from the northeast. Robespierre's words on the Supreme Being are never a brimming stream ofdeep feeling; they are a literary concoction: never the self-forgettingexpansion of the religious soul, but only the composite of therhetorician. He thought he had a passion for religion; what he took forreligion was little more than mental decorum. We do not mean that he wasinsincere, or that he was without a feeling for high things. But here, as in all else, his aspiration was far beyond his faculty; he yearnedfor great spiritual emotions, as he had yearned for great thoughts andgreat achievements, but his spiritual capacity was as scanty and obscureas his intelligence. And where unkind Nature thus unequally yokes loftyobjects in a man with a short mental reach, she stamps him with the verydefinition of mediocrity. 

How can we speak with decent patience of a man who seriously thoughtthat he should conciliate the conservative and theological elements ofthe society at his feet, by such an odious opera-piece as the Feast ofthe Supreme Being? This was designed as a triumphant ripost to the Feastof Reason, which Chaumette and his friends had celebrated in the winter. The energumens of the Goddess of Reason had now been some weeks intheir bloody graves; by this time, if they had given the wrong answer tothe supreme enigma, their eyes would perhaps be opened. Robespierrepersuaded the Convention to decree an official recognition of theSupreme Being, and to attend a commemorative festival in honour of theirmystic patron. He contrived to be chosen president for the decade inwhich the festival would fall. When the day came (20th Prairial, June 8, 1794), he clothed himself with more than even his usual care. As helooked out from the windows of the Tuileries upon the jubilant crowd inthe gardens, he was intoxicated with enthusiasm. 'O Nature, ' he cried, 'how sublime thy power, how full of delight! How tyrants must grow paleat the idea of such a festival as this!' In pontifical pride he walkedat the head of the procession, with flowers and wheat-ears in his hand, to the sound of chants and symphonies and choruses of maidens. On thefirst of the great basins in the gardens, David, the artist, had devisedan allegorical structure for which an inauspicious doom was prepared. Atheism, a statue of life size, was throned in the midst of an amiablegroup of human Vices, with Madness by her side, and Wisdom menacing themwith lofty wrath. Great are the perils of symbolism. Robespierre applieda torch to Atheism, but alas, the wind was hostile, or else Atheism andMadness were damp. They obstinately resisted the torch, and it washapless Wisdom who took fire. Her face, all blackened by smoke, grinneda hideous ghastly grin at her sturdy rivals. The miscarriage of theallegory was an evil omen, and men probably thought how much better thechurchmen always managed their conjurings and the art of spectacle. There was a great car drawn by milk-white oxen; in the front were rangedsheaves of golden grain, while at the back shepherds and shepherdessesposed with scenic graces. The whole mummery was pagan. It was a bringingback of Cerealia and Thesmophoria to earth. It stands as the mostdisgusting and contemptible anachronism in history. 

The famous republican Calendar, with its Prairials and Germinals, itsVentoses and Pluvioses, was an anachronism of the same kind, though itwas less despicable in its manifestation. Its philosophic base was justas retrograde and out of season as the fooleries of the Feast of theSupreme Being. The association of worship and sacredness with the fruitsof the earth, with the forces of nature, with the power and variety ofthe elements, could only be sincere so long as men really thought of allthese things as animated each by a special will of its own. Such anassociation became mere charlatanry, when knowledge once passed into thepositive stage. How could men go back to adore an outer world, afterthey had found out the secret that it is a mere huge group of phenomena, following fixed courses, and not obeying spontaneous and unaccountablevolitions of their own? And what could be more puerile than the fancifulconnection of the Supreme Being with a pastoral simplicity of life? Thissimplicity was gone, irrecoverably gone, with the passage from nomadtimes to the complexities of a modern society. To typify, therefore, theSupreme Being as specially interested in shocks of grain and inshepherds and shepherdesses was to make him a mere figure in an idyll, the ornament of a rural mask, a god of the garden, instead of thesovereign director of the universal forces, and stern master of thedestinies of men. Chaumette's commemoration of the Divinity of Reasonwas a sensible performance, compared with Robespierre's farcicalrepartee. It was something, as Comte has said, to select for worshipman's most individual attribute. If they could not contemplate societyas a whole, it was at least a gain to pay homage to that faculty in thehuman rulers of the world, which had brought the forces of nature--itspluviosity, nivosity, germinality, and vendemiarity--under the yoke forthe service of men. 

If the philosophy of Robespierre's pageant was so retrograde and false, its politics were still more inane. It is a monument of presumptuousinfatuation that any one should feel so strongly as he did that ordercould only be restored on condition of coming to terms with religioususe and prejudice, and then that he should dream that his SupremeBeing--a mere didactic phrase, the deity of a poet's georgic--shouldadequately replace that eternal marvel of construction, by means ofwhich the great churchmen had wrought dogma and liturgy and priest andholy office into every hour and every mood of men's lives. There is nobinding principle of human association in a creed with this one baldarticle. 'In truth, ' as I have said elsewhere of such deism asRobespierre's, 'one can scarcely call it a creed. It is mainly a namefor a particular mood of fine spiritual exaltation; the expression of astate of indefinite aspiration and supreme feeling for lofty things. Areyou going to convert the new barbarians of our western world with thisfair word of emptiness? Will you sweeten the lives of suffering men, andtake its heaviness from that droning piteous chronicle of wrong andcruelty and despair, which everlastingly saddens the compassionating earlike moaning of a midnight sea; will you animate the stout of heart withnew fire, and the firm of hand with fresh joy of battle, by the thoughtof a being without intelligible attributes, a mere abstract creation ofmetaphysic, whose mercy is not as our mercy, nor his justice as ourjustice, nor his fatherhood as the fatherhood of men? It was not by acold, a cheerless, a radically depraving conception such as this, thatthe church became the refuge of humanity in the dark times of old, butby the representation, to men sitting in bondage and confusion, ofgodlike natures moving among them, under figure of the most eternallytouching of human relations, --a tender mother ever interceding for them, and an elder brother laying down his life that their burdens might beloosened. '

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On the day of the Feast of the Supreme Being, the guillotine wasconcealed in the folds of rich hangings. It was the Twentieth ofPrairial. Two days later Couthon proposed to the Convention thememorable Law of the Twenty-second Prairial. Robespierre was thedraftsman, and the text of it still remains in his own writing. Thismonstrous law is simply the complete abrogation of all law. Of all lawsever passed in the world it is the most nakedly iniquitous. Tyrants haveoften substituted their own will for the ordered procedure of atribunal, but no tyrant before ever went through the atrocious farce ofdeliberately making a tribunal the organised negation of security forjustice. Couthon laid its theoretic base in a fallacy that must alwaysbe full of seduction to shallow persons in authority: 'He who wouldsubordinate the public safety to the inventions of jurisconsults, to theformulas of the Court, is either an imbecile or a scoundrel. ' As ifpublic safety could mean anything but the safety of the public. Theauthor of the Law of Prairial had forgotten the minatory word of thesage to whom he had gone on a pilgrimage in the days of his youth. 'Allbecomes legitimate and even virtuous, ' Helvétius had written, 'on behalfof the public safety. ' Rousseau inscribed on the margin, 'The publicsafety is nothing, unless individuals enjoy security. ' What security waspossible under the Law of Prairial?

After the probity and good judgment of the tribunal, the two cardinalguarantees in state trials are accurate definition, and proof. Theoffence must be capable of precise description, and the proof againstan offender must conform to strict rule. The Law of Prairial violentlyinfringed all three of these essential conditions of judicial equity. First, the number of the jury who had power to convict was reduced. Second, treason was made to consist in such vague and infinitely elastickinds of action as inspiring discouragement, misleading opinion, depraving manners, corrupting patriots, abusing the principles of theRevolution by perfidious applications. Third, proof was to lie in theconscience of the jury; there was an end of preliminary inquiry, ofwitnesses in defence, and of counsel for the accused. Any kind oftestimony was evidence, whether material or moral, verbal or written, ifit was of a kind 'likely to gain the assent of a man of reasonablemind. '

Now what was Robespierre's motive in devising this infernal instrument?The theory that he loved judicial murder for its own sake, can only beheld by the silliest of royalist or clerical partisans. It is like thetheory of the vulgar kind of Protestantism, that Mary Tudor or Philip ofSpain had a keen delight in shedding blood. Robespierre, like Mary andlike Philip, would have been as well pleased if all the world would havecome round to his mind without the destruction of a single life. Thetrue inquisitor is a creature of policy, not a man of blood by taste. What, then, was the policy that inspired the Law of Prairial? To us theanswer seems clear. We know what was the general aim in Robespierre'smind at this point in the history of the Revolution. His brotherAugustin was then the representative of the Convention with the army ofItaly, and General Bonaparte was on terms of close intimacy with him. Bonaparte said long afterwards, when he was expiating a life of iniquityon the rock of Saint Helena, that he saw long letters from Maximilian toAugustin Robespierre, all blaming the Conventional Commissioners--Tallien, Fouché, Barras, Collot, and the rest--for the horrors they perpetrated, and accusing them of ruining the Revolution by their atrocities. Again, there is abundant testimony that Robespierre did his best to induce theCommittee of Public Safety to bring those odious malefactors to justice. The text of the Law itself discloses the same object. The vague phrases ofdepraving manners and applying revolutionary principles perfidiously, wereexactly calculated to smite the band of violent men whose conduct was toRobespierre the scandal of the Revolution. And there was a curious clausein the law as originally presented, which deprived the Convention of theright of preventing measures against its own members. Robespierre's generaldesign in short was to effect a further purgation of the Convention. Thereis no reason to suppose that he deliberately aimed at any more generalextermination. On the other hand, it is incredible that, as some havemaintained, he should merely have had in view the equalisation of rich andpoor before the tribunals, by withdrawing the aid of counsel and testimonyto civic character from both rich and poor alike. 

If Robespierre's design was what we believe it to have been, the resultwas a ghastly failure. The Committee of Public Safety would not consentto apply his law against the men for whom he had specially designed it. The frightful weapon which he had forged was seized by the Committee ofGeneral Security, and Paris was plunged into the fearful days of theGreat Terror. The number of persons put to death by the RevolutionaryTribunal before the Law of Prairial had been comparatively moderate. From the creation of the tribunal in April 1793, down to the executionof the Hébertists in March 1794, the number of persons condemned todeath was 505. From the death of the Hébertists down to the death ofRobespierre, the number of the condemned was 2158. One half of theentire number of victims, namely, 1356, were guillotined after the Lawof Prairial. No deadlier instrument was ever invented by the cruelty ofman. Innocent women no less than innocent men, poor no less than rich, those in whom life was almost spent, no less than those in whom itspulse was strongest, virtuous no less than vicious, were sent off inwoe-stricken batches all those summer days. A man was informed against;he was seized in his bed at five in the morning; at seven he was takento the Conciergerie; at nine he received information of the chargeagainst him; at ten he went into the dock; by two in the afternoon hewas condemned; by four his head lay in the executioner's basket. 

What stamps the system of the Terror at this date with a wickednessthat cannot be effaced, is that at no moment was the danger from foreignor domestic foe less serious. We may always forgive something towell-grounded panic. The proscriptions of an earlier date in Paris werenot excessively sanguinary, if we remember that the city abounded inroyalists and other reactionists, who were really dangerous in fomentingdiscouragement and spreading confusion. If there ever is an excuse formartial law, and it must be rare, the French government were warrantedin resorting to it in 1793. Paris in those days was like a citybeleaguered, and the world does not use very harsh words about thecommandant of a besieged town who puts to death traitors found withinhis walls. Opinion in England at this very epoch encouraged the Torygovernment to pass a Treason Bill, which introduced as vague adefinition of treasonable offence as even the Law of Prairial itself. Windham did not shrink from declaring in parliament that he and hiscolleagues were determined to exact 'a rigour beyond the law. ' And theywere as good as their word. The Jacobins had no monopoly either of cruellaw or cruel breach of law in the eighteenth century. Only thirty yearsbefore, opinion in Pennsylvania had prompted a hideous massacre ofharmless Indians as a deed acceptable to God, and the grandson ofWilliam Penn proclaimed a bounty of fifty dollars for the scalp of afemale Indian, and three times as much for a male. A man would have hadquite as good a chance of justice from the Revolutionary Tribunal, asat the hands of Braxfield, the Scotch judge, who condemned Muir andPalmer for sedition in 1793, and who told the government, with a brazenfront worthy of Carrier or Collot d'Herbois themselves, that, if theywould only send him prisoners, he would find law for them. 

We have no sympathy with the spirit of paradox that has arisen in thesedays, amusing itself by the vindication of bad men. We think that theauthor of the Law of Prairial was a bad man. But it is time that thereshould be an end of the cant which lifts up its hands at the crimes ofrepublicans and freethinkers, and shuts its eyes to the crimes of kingsand churches. Once more, we ought to rise into a higher air; we ought tocondemn, wherever we find it, whether on the side of our adversaries oron our own, all readiness to substitute arbitrary force for theprocesses of ordered justice. There are moments when such a readinessmay be leniently judged, but Prairial of 1794 was not one of them eitherin France or in England. And what makes the crime of this law moreodious, is its association with the official proclamation of the Stateworship of a Supreme Being. The scene of Robespierre's holy festivalbecomes as abominable as a catholic Auto-da-fé, where solemn homage wasoffered to the God of pity and loving-kindness, while flame glowed roundthe limbs of the victims. 

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Robespierre was inflamed with resentment, not because so many peoplewere guillotined every day, but because the objects of his own enmitywere not among them. He was chagrined at the miscarriage of his scheme;but the chagrin had its root in his desire for order, and not in hishumanity. A good man--say so imperfectly good a man as Danton--could nothave endured life, after enacting such a law, and seeing the ghastlywork that it was doing. He could hardly have contented himself withdrawing tears from the company in Madame Duplay's little parlour, by hispathetic recitations from Corneille and Racine, or with listening tomelting notes from the violin of Le Bas. It is commonly said byRobespierre's defenders that he withdrew from the Committee of PublicSafety, as soon as he found out that he was powerless to arrest thedaily shedding of blood. The older assumption used to be that he leftParis, and ceased to be cognisant of the Committee's deliberations. Theminutes, however, prove that this was not the case. Robespierre signedpapers nearly every day of Messidor--(June 19 to July 18) theblood-stained month between Prairial and Thermidor--and was thoroughlyaware of the doings of the Committee. His partisans have now fallen backon the singular theory of what they style moral absence. He was presentin the flesh, but standing aloof in the spirit. His frowning silence wasa deadlier rebuke to the slayers and oppressors than secession. Unfortunately for this ingenious explanation of the embarrassing fact ofa merciful man standing silent before merciless doings, there are atleast two facts that show its absurdity. 

First, there is the affair of Catherine Théot. Catherine Théot was acrazy old woman of a type that is commoner in protestant than incatholic countries. She believed herself to have special gifts in theinterpretation of the holy writings, and a few other people as crazy asherself chose to accept her pretensions. One revelation vouchsafed toher was to the effect that Robespierre was a Messiah and the newredeemer of the human race. The Committee of General Security resolvedto indict this absurd sect. Vadier, --one of the roughest of the men whomthe insurrections of Paris had brought to the front--reported on thecharges to the Convention (27 Prairial, June 15), and he took theopportunity to make Robespierre look profoundly ridiculous. Theunfortunate Messiah sat on his bench, gnawing his lips with bitter rage, while, amid the sneers and laughter of the Convention, the officersbrought to the bar the foolish creatures who had called him the Son ofGod. His thin pride and prudish self-respect were unutterably affronted, and he quite understood that the ridicule of the mysticism of Théot wasan indirect pleasantry upon his own Supreme Being. He flew to theCommittee of Public Safety, angrily reproached them for permitting theprosecution, summoned Fouquier-Tinville, and peremptorily ordered him tolet the matter drop. In vain did the public prosecutor point out thatthere was a decree of the Convention ordering him to proceed. Robespierre was inexorable. The Committee of General Security werebaffled, and the prosecution ended. 'Lutteur impuissant et fatigué, 'says M. Hamel, the most thoroughgoing defender of Robespierre, uponthis, 'il va se retirer, moralement du moins. ' Impotent and wearied! Buthe had just won a most signal victory for good sense and humanity. Whywas it the only one? If Robespierre was able to save Théot, why could henot save Cécile Renault?

Cécile Renault was a young seamstress who was found one evening at thedoor of Robespierre's lodging, calling out in a state of exaltation thatshe would fain see what a tyrant looked like. She was arrested, and uponher were found two little knives used for the purposes of her trade. That she should be arrested and imprisoned was natural enough. The timeswere charged with deadly fire. People had not forgotten that Marat hadbeen murdered in his own house. Only a few days before Cécile Renault'svisit to Robespierre, an assassin had fired a pistol at Collot d'Herboison the staircase of his apartment. We may make allowance for theexcitement of the hour, and Robespierre had as much right to play themartyr, as had Lewis the Fifteenth after the incident of Damiens' rustypen-knife. But the histrionic exigencies of the chief of a faction oughtnot to be pushed too far. And it was a monstrous crime that becauseRobespierre found it convenient to pose as sacrificial victim at theClub, therefore he should have had no scruple in seeing not only thewretched Cécile, but her father, her aunt, and one of her brothers, alldespatched to the guillotine in the red shirt of parricide, as agents ofPitt and Coburg, and assassins of the father of the land. This wasexactly two days after he had shown his decisive power in the affair ofthe religious illuminists. The only possible conclusion open to a plainman after weighing and putting aside all the sophisms with which thisaffair has been obscured, is that Robespierre interfered in the one casebecause its further prosecution would have tended to make himridiculous, and he did not interfere in the other, because the moreexaggerated, the more melodramatic, the more murderous it was made, themore interesting an object would he seem in the eyes of his adorers. 

The second fact bearing on Robespierre's humanity is this. He hadencouraged the formation and stimulated the activity of popularcommissions, who should provide victims for the Revolutionary Tribunal. On the Second of Messidor (June 20) a list containing one hundred andthirty-eight names was submitted for the ratification of the Committee. The Committee endorsed the bloody document, and the last signature ofthe endorsement is that of him, who had resigned a post in his youthrather than be a party to putting a man to death. As was observed at thetime, Robespierre in doing this, suppressed his pique against hiscolleagues, in order to take part in a measure, that was a sort ofcomplement to his Law of Prairial. 

From these two circumstances, then, even if there were no other, we arejustified in inferring that Robespierre was struck by no remorse at thethought that it was his law which had unbound the hands of the horriblegenie of civil murder. His mind was wholly absorbed in the calculationsof a frigid egoism. His intelligence, as we have always to remember, wasvery dim. He only aimed at one thing at once, and that was seldomanything very great or far-reaching. He was a man of peering andobscured vision in face of practical affairs. In passing the Law ofPrairial, his designs--and they were meritorious and creditable designsenough in themselves--had been directed against the corrupt chiefs, suchas Tallien and Fouché, and against the fierce and coarse spirits of theCommittee of General Security, such as Vadier and Voulland. Robespierrewas above all things a precisian. He had a sentimental sympathy with thecommon people in the abstract, but his spiritual pride, his pedantry, his formalism, his personal fastidiousness, were all wounded to the veryquick by the kind of men whom the Revolution had thrown to the surface. Gouverneur Morris, then the American minister, describes most of themembers of the two Committees as the very dregs of humanity, with whomit is a stain to have any dealings; as degraded men only worthy of theprofoundest contempt. Danton had said: 'Robespierre is the least of ascoundrel of any of the band. ' The Committee of General Securityrepresented the very elements by which Robespierre was most revolted. They offended his respectability; their evil manners seemed to tarnishthat good name which his vanity hoped to make as revered all overEurope, as it already was among his partisans in France. It wasindispensable therefore to cut them off from the revolutionarygovernment, just as Hébert and as Danton had been cut off. Hiscolleagues of Public Safety refused to lend themselves to this. Henceforth, with characteristically narrow tenacity, he looked round fornew combinations, but, so far as I can see, with no broader design thanto enable him to punish these particular objects of his very justdetestation. 

The position of sections and interests which ended in the Revolution ofThermidor, is one of the most extraordinarily intricate and entangled inthe history of faction. It would take a volume to follow out all theperipeteias of the drama. Here we can only enumerate in a few sentencesthe parties to the contest and the conditions of the game. The readerwill easily discern the difficulty in Robespierre's way of making aneffective combination. First, there were the two Committees. Of thesethe one, the General Security, was thoroughly hostile to Robespierre;its members, as we have said, were wild and hardy spirits, with nopolitical conception, and with a great contempt for fine phrases andphilosophical principles. They knew Robespierre's hatred for them, andthey heartily returned it. They were the steadfast centre of thechanging schemes which ended in his downfall. The Committee of PublicSafety was divided. Carnot hated Saint Just, and Collot d'Herbois hatedRobespierre, and Billaud had a sombre distrust of Robespierre'scounsels. Shortly speaking, the object of the Billaudists was to retaintheir power, and their power was always menaced from two quarters, theConvention and Paris. If they let Robespierre have his own way againsthis enemies, would they not be at his mercy whenever he chose to devisea popular insurrection against them? Yet if they withstood Robespierre, they could only do so through the agency of the Convention, and to fallback upon the Convention would be to give that body an expressinvitation to resume the power that had, in the pressure of the crisis ayear before, been delegated to the Committee, and periodically renewedafterwards. The dilemma of Billaud seemed desperate, and eventsafterwards proved that it was so. 

If we turn to the Convention, we find the position equally distracting. They, too, feared another insurrection and a second decimation. If theRight helped Robespierre to destroy the Fouchés and Vadiers, he would bestronger than ever; and what security had they against a repetition ofthe violence of the Thirty-first of May? If the Dantonists joined indestroying Robespierre, they would be helping the Right, and whatsecurity had they against a Girondin reaction? On the other hand, theCentre might fairly hope, just what Billaud feared, that if theCommittee came to the Convention to crush Robespierre, that would end ina combination strong enough to enable the Convention to crush theCommittees. 

Much depended on military success. The victories of the generals werethe great strength of the Committee. For so long it would be difficultto turn opinion against a triumphant administration. 'At the firstdefeat, ' Robespierre had said to Barère, 'I await you. ' But the defeatdid not come. The plotting went on with incessant activity; on one hand, Robespierre, aided by Saint Just and Couthon, strengthening himself atthe Jacobin Club, and through that among the sections; on the other, theMountain and the Committee of General Security trying to win over theRight, more contemptuously christened the Marsh or the Belly, of theConvention. The Committee of Public Safety was not yet fully decided howto act. 

At the end of the first week of Thermidor, Robespierre could endure thetension no longer. He had tried to fortify his nerves for the struggleby riding, but with so little success that he was lifted off his horsefainting. He endeavoured to steady himself by diligent pistol-practice. But nothing gave him initiative and the sinews of action. Saint Justurged him to raise Paris. Some bold men proposed to carry off themembers of the Committee bodily from their midnight deliberations. Robespierre declined, and fell back on what he took to be his greateststrength and most unfailing resource; he prepared a speech. On theEighth of Thermidor he delivered it to the Convention, amid intenseexcitement both within its walls and without. All Paris knew that theywere now on the eve of one more of the famous Days; the revolution ofThermidor had begun. 

The speech of the Eighth Thermidor has seemed to men of all partiessince a masterpiece of tactical ineptitude. If Robespierre had been astatesman instead of a phrasemonger, he had a clear course. He ought tohave taken the line of argument that Danton would have taken. That is tosay, he ought to have identified himself fully with the interests andsecurity of the Convention; to have accepted the growing resolution toclose the Terror; to have boldly pressed the abolition of the Committeeof General Security, and the removal from the Committee of Public Safetyof Billaud, Collot, Barère; to have proposed to send about fifty personsto Cayenne for life; and to have urged a policy of peace with theforeign powers. This was the substantial wisdom and real interest of theposition. The task was difficult, because his hearers had the bestpossible reasons for knowing that the author of the Law of Prairial wasa Terrorist on principle. And in truth we know that Robespierre had nodefinite intention of erecting clemency into a rule. He had not mentalstrength enough to throw off the profound apprehension, which theincessant alarms of the last five years had engendered in him; and theonly device, that he could imagine for maintaining the republic againsttraitors, was to stimulate the rigour of the Revolutionary Tribunal. 

If, however, Robespierre lacked the grasp which might have made him therepresentative of a broad and stable policy, it was at least hisinterest to persuade the men of the Plain that he entertained no designsagainst them. And this is what in his own mind he intended. But to do iteffectively, it was clearly best to tell his hearers, in so many words, whom he really wished them to strike. That would have relieved themajority, and banished the suspicion which had been busily fomented byhis enemies, that he had in his pocket a long list of their names, forproscription. But Robespierre, having for the first time in his lifeventured on aggressive action without the support of a definite party, faltered. He dared not to designate his enemies face to face and byname. Instead of that, he talked vaguely of conspirators against therepublic, and calumniators of himself. There was not a single bold, definite, unmistakable sentence in the speech from first to last. Themen of the Plain were insecure and doubtful; they had no certainty thatamong conspirators and calumniators he did not include too many ofthemselves. People are not so readily seized by grand phrases, whentheir heads are at stake. The sitting was long, and marked by changingcurrents and reverses. When they broke up, all was left uncertain. Robespierre had suffered a check. Billaud felt that he could no longerhesitate in joining the combination against his colleague. Each partywas aware that the next day must seal the fate of one or other of them. There is a legend that in the evening Robespierre walked in the ChampsElysées with his betrothed, accompanied as usual by his faithful dog, Brount. They admired the purple of the sunset, and talked of theprospect of a glorious to-morrow. But this is apocryphal. The eveningwas passed in no lover's saunterings, but amid the storm and uproar ofthe Club. He went to the Jacobins to read over again his speech of theday. 'It is my testament of death, ' he said, amid the passionateprotestations of his devoted followers. He had been talking for the lastthree years of his willingness to drink the hemlock, and to offer hisbreast to the poniards of tyrants. That was a fashion of the speech ofthe time, and in earlier days it had been more than a fashion of speech, for Brunswick would have given them short shrift. But now, when hetalked of his last testament, Robespierre did not intend it to be so ifhe could prevent it. When he went to rest that night, he had a tolerablycalm hope that he should win the next day's battle in the Convention, when he was aware that Saint Just would attack the Committees openly anddirectly. If he would have allowed his band to invade the Pavillon deFlore, and carry off or slay the Committees who sat up through thenight, the battle would have been won when he awoke. His friends arejustified in saying that his strong respect for legality was the causeof his ruin. 

Men in all ages have had a superstitious fondness for connecting awfulevents in their lives with portents and signs among the outer elements. It was noticed that the heat during the terrible days of Thermidor wasmore intense than had been known within the memory of man. Thethermometer never fell below sixty-five degrees in the coolest part ofthe night, and in the daytime men and women and beasts of burden felldown dead in the streets. By five o'clock in the morning of the NinthThermidor, the galleries of the Convention were filled by a boisterousand excited throng. At ten o'clock the proceedings began as usual withthe reading of correspondence from the departments and from the armies. Robespierre, who had been escorted from his lodgings by the usual bodyof admirers, instead of taking his ordinary seat, remained standing bythe side of the tribune. It is a familiar fact that moments of appallingsuspense are precisely those in which we are most ready involuntarily tonote a trifle; everybody observed that Robespierre wore the coat ofviolet-blue silk and the white nankeens in which a few weeks previouslyhe had done honour to the Supreme Being. 

The galleries seemed as enthusiastic as ever. The men of the Plain andthe Marsh had lost the abject mien with which they usually coweredbefore Robespierre's glance; they wore a courageous air of judicialreserve. The leaders of the Mountain wandered restlessly to and froamong the corridors. At noon Tallien saw that Saint Just had ascendedthe tribune. Instantly he rushed down into the chamber, knowing thatthe battle had now begun in fierce earnest. Saint Just had not gotthrough two sentences, before Tallien interrupted him. He began toinsist with energy that there should be an end to the equivocal phraseswith which Paris had been too long alarmed by the Triumvirate. Billaud, fearing to be outdone in the attack, hastily forced his way to thetribune, broke into what Tallien was saying, and proceeded dexterouslyto discredit Robespierre's allies without at once assailing Robespierrehimself. Le Bas ran in a fury to stop him; Collot d'Herbois, thepresident, declared Le Bas out of order; the hall rang with cries of 'Toprison! To the Abbey!' and Le Bas was driven from the tribune. This wasthe beginning of the tempest. Robespierre's enemies knew that they werefighting for their lives, and this inspired them with a strong andresolute power that is always impressive in popular assemblies. He stillthought himself secure. Billaud pursued his accusations. Robespierre, atlast, unable to control himself, scaled the tribune. There suddenlyburst forth from Tallien and his partisans vehement shouts of 'Down withthe tyrant! down with the tyrant!' The galleries were swept by a wildfrenzy of vague agitation; the president's bell poured loud incessantclanging into the tumult; the men of the Plain held themselves firm andsilent; in the tribune raged ferocious groups, Tallien menacingRobespierre with a dagger, Billaud roaring out proposals to arrest thisperson and that Robespierre gesticulating, threatening, yelling, shrieking. His enemies knew that if he were once allowed to get ahearing, his authority might even yet overawe the waverers. Apenetrative word or a heroic gesture might lose them the day. Themajority of the chamber still hesitated. They called for Barère, inwhose adroit faculty for discovering the winning side they had theconfidence of long experience. Robespierre, recovering some of his calm, and perceiving now that he had really to deal with a serious revolt, again asked to be heard before Barère. But the cries for Barère werelouder than ever. Barère spoke, in a sense hostile to Robespierre, butwarily and without naming him. 

Then there was a momentary lull. The Plain was uncertain. The battlemight even now turn either way. Robespierre made another attempt tospeak, but Tallien with intrepid fury broke out into a torrent of louderand more vehement invective. Robespierre's shrill voice was heard indisjected snatches, amidst the violent tones of Tallien, the yells ofthe president calling Robespierre to order, the murderous clanging ofthe bell. Then came that supreme hour of the struggle, whose tale hasbeen so often told, when Robespierre turned from his old allies of theMountain, and succeeded in shrieking out an appeal to the probity andvirtue of the Right and the Plain. To his horror, even these despisedmen, after a slight movement, remained mute. Then his cheeks blanched, and the sweat ran down his face. But anger and scornful impatienceswiftly came back and restored him. _President of assassins_, he criedout to Thuriot, _for the last time I ask to be heard. Thou canst notspeak_, called one, _the blood of Danton chokes thee_. He flung himselfdown the steps of the tribune, and rushed towards the benches of theRight. _Come no further_, cried another, _Vergniaud and Condorcet sathere_. He regained the tribune, but his speech was gone. He was reducedto the dregs of an impotent and gasping voiceless gesticulation, likethe strife of one in a nightmare. 

The day was lost. The tension of a passionate and violent struggleprolonged for many hours always at length exasperates onlookers withsomething of the brute ferocity of the actors. The physical strain stirsthe tiger in the blood; they conceive a cruel hatred against weakness, just as the heated throng of a Roman amphitheatre turned up their thumbsfor the instant despatch of the unfortunate swordsman who had been tooready to lower his arms. The Right, the Plain, even the galleries, despised the man who had succumbed. If Robespierre had possessed thephysical strength of Mirabeau or Danton, the Ninth Thermidor would havebeen another of his victories. He was crushed by the relentless ferocityand endurance of his antagonists. A decree for his arrest was resolvedupon by acclamation. He cast a glance at the galleries, as marvellingthat they should remain passive in face of an outrage on his person. They were mute. The ushers advanced with hesitation to do their duty, and not without trembling carried him away, along with Couthon andSaint Just. The brother, for whom he had made honourable sacrifices indays that seemed to be divided from the present by an abyss ofcenturies, insisted with fine heroism on sharing his fate, and AugustinRobespierre and Le Bas were led off to the prisons along with theirleader and idol. 

It was now a little after four o'clock. The Convention, with theself-possession that so often amazes us in its proceedings, went on withformal business for another hour. At five they broke up. For life, asthe poets tell, is a daily stage-play; men declaim their high heroicparts, then doff the buskin or the sock, wash away the paint from theircheeks, and gravely sit down to meat. The Conventionals, as they atetheir dinners, were unconscious, apparently, that the great crisis ofthe drama was still to come. The next twelve hours were to witness theclimax. Robespierre had been crushed by the Convention; it remained tobe seen whether the Convention would not now be crushed by the Communeof Paris. 

Robespierre was first conducted to the prisons of the Luxembourg. Thegaoler, on some plea of informality, refused to receive him. Theterrible prisoner was next taken to the Mairie, where he remained amongjoyful friends from eight in the evening until eleven. Meanwhile the oldinsurrectionary methods of the nights of June and of August in '92, ofMay and of June in '93, were again followed. The beating of the _rappel_and the _générale_ was heard in all the sections; the tocsin sounded itsdreadful note, reminding all who should hear it that insurrection isthe most sacred and the most indispensable of duties. Hanriot, thecommandant of the forces, had been arrested in the evening, but he wasspeedily released by the agents of the Commune. The Council issuedmanifestoes and decrees from the Common Hall every moment. The barrierswere closed. Cannon were posted opposite the doors of the hall of theConvention. The quays were thronged. Emissaries sped to and fro betweenthe Jacobin Club and the Common Hall, and between these two centres andeach of the forty-eight sections. It is one of the inscrutable mysteriesof this delirious night, that Hanriot did not at once use the force athis command to break up the Convention. There is no obvious reason whyhe should not have done so. The members of the Convention hadre-assembled after their dinner, towards seven o'clock. The hall whichhad resounded with the shrieks and yells of the furious gladiators ofthe factions all day, now lent a lugubrious echo to gloomy reports whichone member after another delivered from the shadow of the tribune. Towards nine o'clock the members of the two dread Committees came inpanic to seek shelter among their colleagues, 'as dejected in theirperil, ' says an eyewitness, 'as they had been cruel and insolent in thehour of their supremacy. ' When they heard that Hanriot had beenreleased, and that guns were at their door, all gave themselves up forlost and made ready for death. News came that Robespierre had broken hisarrest and gone to the Common Hall. Robespierre, after urgent andrepeated solicitations, had been at length persuaded about an hourbefore midnight to leave the Mairie and join his partisans of theCommune. This was an act of revolt against the Convention, for theMairie was a legal place of detention, and so long as he was there, hewas within the law. The Convention with heroic intrepidity declared bothHanriot and Robespierre beyond the pale of the law. This prompt measurewas its salvation. Twelve members were instantly named to carry thedecree to all the sections. With the scarf of office round their waists, and a sabre in hand, they sallied forth. Mounting horses, and escortedby attendants with flaring torches, they scoured Paris, calling all goodcitizens to the succour of the Convention, haranguing crowds at thestreet corners with power and authority, and striking the imaginationsof men. At midnight heavy rain began to fall. 

The leaders of the Commune meanwhile, in full confidence that victorywas sure, contented themselves with incessant issue of paper decrees, toeach of which the Convention replied by a counter-decree. Those who havestudied the situation most minutely, are of opinion that even so late asone o'clock in the morning, the Commune might have made a successfuldefence, although it had lost the opportunity, which it had certainlypossessed up to ten o'clock, of destroying the Convention. But on thisoccasion the genius of insurrection slumbered. And there was a genuinedivision of opinion in the eastern quarters of Paris, the result of agrim distrust of the man who had helped to slay Hébert and Chaumette. Ata word this distrust began to declare itself. The opinion of thesections became more and more distracted. One armed group cried, _Downwith the Convention!_ Another armed group cried, _The Convention forever, and down with the Commune!_ The two great faubourgs were allastir, and three battalions were ready to march. Emissaries from theConvention actually succeeded in persuading them--such the dementia ofthe night--that Robespierre was a royalist agent, and that the Communewere about to deliver the little Lewis from his prison in the Temple. One body of communist partisans after another was detached from itsallegiance. The deluge of rain emptied the Place de Grève, and whencompanies came up from the sections in obedience to orders from Hanriotand the Commune, the silence made them suspect a trap, and they withdrewtowards the great metropolitan church or elsewhere. 

Barras, whom the Convention had charged with its military defence, gathered together some six thousand men. With the right instinct of aman who had studied the history of Paris since the July of 1789, heforesaw the advantage of being the first to make the attack. He arrangedhis forces into two divisions. One of them marched along the quays totake the Common Hall in front; the other along the Rue Saint Honoré totake it in flank. Inside the Common Hall the staircases and corridorswere alive with bustling messengers, and those mysterious busybodies whoare always found lingering without a purpose on the skirts of greathistoric scenes. Robespierre and the other chiefs were in a small room, preparing manifestoes and signing decrees. They were curiously unawareof the movements of the Convention. An aggressive attack by the party ofauthority upon the party of insurrection was unknown in the tradition ofrevolt. They had an easy assurance that at daybreak their forces wouldbe prepared once more to tramp along the familiar road westwards. It wasnow half-past two. Robespierre had just signed the first two letters ofhis name to a document before him, when he was startled by cries anduproar in the Place below. In a few instants he lay stretched on theground, his jaw shattered by a pistol-shot. His brother had eitherfallen or had leaped out of the window. Couthon was hurled over astaircase, and lay for dead. Saint Just was a prisoner. 

Whether Robespierre was shot by an officer of the Conventional force, orattempted to blow out his own brains, we shall never know, any more thanwe shall ever be quite assured how Rousseau, his spiritual master, cameto an end. The wounded man was carried, a ghastly sight, first to theCommittee of Public Safety, and then to the Conciergerie, where he layin silent stupefaction through the heat of the summer day. As he was anoutlaw, the only legal preliminary before execution was to identifyhim. At five in the afternoon, he was raised into the cart Couthon andthe younger Robespierre lay, confused wrecks of men, at the bottom ofit. Hanriot and Saint Just, bruised, begrimed, and foul, completed theband. One who walks from the Palace of Justice, over the bridge, alongthe Rue Saint Honoré, into the Rue Royale, and so to the Luxor column, retraces the _via dolorosa_ of the Revolution on the afternoon of theTenth of Thermidor. 

 * * * * *

The end of the intricate manoeuvres known as the Revolution ofThermidor was the recovery of authority by the Convention. Theinsurrections, known as the days of the Twelfth Germinal, FirstPrairial, and Thirteenth Vendémiaire, all ended in the victory of theConvention over the revolutionary forces of Paris. The Committees, onthe other hand, had beaten Robespierre, but they had ruined themselves. Very gradually the movement towards order, which had begun in the mindof Danton, and had gone on in the cloudy purposes of Robespierre, becamedefinite. But it was in the interest of very different ideas from thoseof either Danton or of Robespierre. A White Terror succeeded the RedTerror. Not at once, however; it was not until nine months after thedeath of Robespierre, that the reaction was strong enough to smite hiscolleagues of the two Committees. The surviving Girondins had come backto their seats in the Convention: the Dantonians had not forgiven theexecution of their chief. These two parties were bent on vengeance. InApril, 1795, a decree was passed banishing Billaud de Varennes, Collotd'Herbois, and Barère. In the following month the leaders of theCommittee of General Security were thrown into prison. The revolutionhad passed into new currents. We cannot see any reasons for thinkingthat those currents would have led to any happier results if Robespierrehad won the battle. Tallien, Fouché, Barras, and the rest may have beenthoroughly bad men. But then what qualities had Robespierre for buildingup a state? He had neither strength of practical character, nor firmbreadth of political judgment, nor a sound social doctrine. When wecompare him, --I do not say with Frederick of Prussia, with Jefferson, with Washington, --but with the group of able men who made the closingyear of the Convention honourable and of good service to France, we havea measure of Robespierre's profound and pitiable incompetence.