The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4

H >> Hippolyte A. Taine >> The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4

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The insurgents are thus conscious of their false position; they have a
vague sort of feeling that, in recognizing the military authority of
the Convention, they admit its authority in full; insensibly they
glide down this slope, from concession to concession, until they reach
complete submission. From the 16th of June, at Lyons,[64] "people
begin to feel that it ought not break with the Convention." Five weeks
later, the authorities of Lyons "solemnly recognize that the
Convention is the sole central rallying point of all French citizens
and republicans," and decree that "all acts emanating from it
concerning the general interests of the republic are to be
executed."[65] Consequently, at Lyons and in other departments, the
administrations convoke the primary assemblies as the Convention has
prescribed; consequently, the primary assemblies accept the
Constitution which it has proposed; consequently, the delegates of the
primary assemblies betake themselves to Paris according to its orders.
-- Henceforth, the Girondins' cause is lost; the discharge of a few
cannon at Vernon and Avignon disperse the only two columns of soldiery
that have set out on their march. In each department, the Jacobins,
encouraged by the representatives on mission, raise their heads;
everywhere the local club enjoins the local government to submit,[66]
everywhere the local governments report the acts they pass, make
excuses and ask forgiveness. Proportionately to the retraction of one
department, the rest, feeling themselves abandoned, are more disposed
to retract. On the 9th of July forty-nine departments are enumerated
as having given in their adhesion. Several of them declare that the
scales have dropped from their eyes, that they approve of the acts of
May 31 and June 2, and thus ensure their safety by manifesting their
zeal. The administration of Calvados notifies the Breton fédérés that
"having accepted the Constitution it can no longer tolerate their
presence in Caen;" it sends them home, and secretly makes peace with
the "Mountain;" and only informs the deputies, who are its guests, of
this proceeding, three days afterwards, by postings on their door the
decree that declares them outlaws.

Disguised as soldiers, the latter depart along with the Breton
fédérés; on the way, they are able to ascertain the veritable
sentiments of this people whom they believe imbued with their rights
and capable of taking a political initiative.[67] The pretended
citizens and republicans they have to do with are, in sum, the former
subjects of Louis XVI. and the future subjects of Napoleon I., that
is to say, administrators and people, disciplined by habit and
instinctively subordinate, requiring a government just as sheep
require a shepherd and a watch-dog, accepting or submitting to
shepherd and dog, provided these look and act the part, even if the
shepherd be a butcher and the dog a wolf. To avoid isolation, to
rejoin the most numerous herd as soon as possible, to always form
masses and bodies and thus follow the impulsion which comes from
above, and gather together scattered individuals, such is the instinct
of the flock.

In the battalion of federates, they begin by saying that, as the
Constitution is now accepted and the convention recognized, it is no
longer allowed to protect deputies whom it has declared outlaws: "that
would be creating a faction." Thereupon, the deputies withdraw from
the battalion, and, in a little squad by themselves, march along
separately. As they are nineteen in number, resolute and well armed,
the authorities of the market-towns through which they pass make no
opposition by force; it would be offering battle, and that surpasses a
functionary's zeal; moreover, the population is either indifferent
toward them or sympathetic. Nevertheless, efforts are made to stop
them, sometimes to surround them and take them by surprise; for, a
warrant of arrest is out against them, transmitted through the
hierarchical channel, and every local magistrate feels bound to do his
duty as gendarme. Under this administrative network, the meshes of
which they encounter everywhere, the proscribed deputies can do naught
else but hide in caves or escape by sea. -- On reaching Bordeaux,
they find other sheep getting ready for the slaughter-house. Saige,
the mayor, preaches conciliation and patience: he declines the aid of
four or five thousand young men, three thousand grenadiers of the
National Guard, and two or three hundred volunteers who had formed
themselves into a club against the Jacobin club. He persuades them to
disband; he sends a deputation to Paris to entreat the Convention to
overlook "a moment of error" and pardon their "brethren who had gone
astray." -- "They flattered themselves," says a deputy, an eye-
witness,[68] "that prompt submission would appease the resentment of
tyrants and that these would be, or pretend to be, generous enough to
spare a town that had distinguished itself more than any other during
the Revolution." Up to the last, they are to entertain the same
illusions and manifest the same docility. When Tallien, with his
eighteen hundred peasants and brigands, enters Bordeaux, twelve
thousand National Guards, equipped, armed and in uniform, receive him
wearing oak-leaf crowns; they listen in silence to "his astounding and
outrageous discourse;" they suffer him to tear off their crowns,
cockades and epaulettes; the battalions allow themselves to be
disbanded on the spot; on returning to their quarters they listen with
downcast eyes to the proclamation which "orders all inhabitants
without distinction to bring their arms within thirty-six hours, under
the penalty of death, to the glacis of the Chateau-Trompette; before
the time elapses thirty thousand guns, swords, pistols and even
pocket-knives are given up."

Here, as at Paris, on the 20th of June, 10th of August, 2nd of
September, 3rd of May and 2nd of June, as at every critical moment of
the Revolution in Paris and the provinces, habits of subordination and
of amiability, stamped on a people by a provident monarchy and a time-
honored civilization, have blunted in man the foresight of danger, his
aggressive instinct, his independence and the faculty of depending
upon himself only, the willingness to help one another and of saving
himself. Inevitably, when anarchy brings a nation back to the state
of nature, the tame animals will be eaten by the savage ones, -- these
are now let loose and immediately they show their true nature.

VIII. The Reasons for the Terror.

The last local resistance. -- Political orthodoxy of the insurgent
towns. -- They stipulate but one condition. -- Reasons of State for
granting this. -- Party arguments against it.

If the men of the "Mountain" had been statesmen, or even sensible men,
they would have shown themselves humane, if not for the sake of
humanity, at least through calculation; for in this France, so little
republican, all the republican strength is not too great for the
founding of the Republic, while, through their principles, their
culture, their social position and their number, the Girondins form
the élite and the force, the flower and the sap of the party. -- The
death-cry of the "Mountain" against the insurgents of Lozére[69] and
Vendée can be understood: they had raised the king's white flag; they
accepted leaders and instructions from Coblentz and London. But
neither Bordeaux, Marseilles nor Lyons are royalist, or in alliance
with the foreigner.

"We, rebels!" write the Lyonnese;[70] "Why we see no other than the
tri-color flag waving; the white cockade, the symbol of rebellion, has
never been raised within our walls. We, royalists! Why, shouts of
'Long live the Republic' are heard on all sides, and, spontaneously
(in the session of July 2nd) we have all sworn to fall upon whoever
should propose a king. . . . Your representatives tell you that we
are anti-revolutionaries, we who have accepted the Constitution. They
tell you that we protect émigrés when we have offered to surrender all
those that you might indicate. They tell you that our streets are
filled with refractory priests, when we have not even opened the doors
of Pierre-en-Cize (prison) to the thirty-two priests confined there by
the old municipality, without indictment, without any charge whatever
against them, solely because they were priests."

Thus, at Lyons, the pretended aristocrats were, then, not only
republicans but democrats and radicals, loyal to the established
régime, and submissive to the worst of the revolutionary laws, while
the same state of things prevailed at Bordeaux, at Marseilles and even
at Toulon.[71] And furthermore, they accepted the outrages of May 31
and June 2;[72] they stopped contesting the usurpations of Paris; they
no longer insisted on the return of the excluded deputies. On the 2nd
of August at Bordeaux, and the 30th of July at Lyons, the Committee-
Extraordinary of Public Safety resigned; there no longer existed any
rival assembly opposed to the Convention. After the 24th of July,[73]
Lyons solemnly recognized the supreme and central authority, reserving
nothing but its municipal franchises. - And better still, in striking
testimony of political orthodoxy, the Council-General of the
department prescribed a civic festival for the 10th of August
analogous to that of Paris. The Lyonnese, already blockaded, indulged
in no hostile manifestation; on the 7th of August they marched out of
their advanced positions to fraternize with the first body of troops
sent against them.[74] They conceded everything, save on one point,
which they could not yield without destruction, namely, the assurance
that they should not be given up defenseless to the arbitrary judgment
of their local tyrants, to the spoliation, proscriptions and revenge
of the Jacobin rabble. In sum, at Marseilles and Bordeaux, especially
at Lyons and Toulon, the sections had revolted only on that account;
acting promptly and spontaneously, the people had thrust aside the
knife which a few ruffians aimed at their throats; they had not been,
and were not now, willing to be "Septemberised," that was their sole
concern. Provided they were not handed over to the butchers bound
hand and foot, they would open their gates. On these minimum terms
the "Mountain" could terminate the civil war before the end of July.
It had only to follow the example of Robert Lindet who, at Evreux the
home of Buzot, at Caen the home of Charlotte Corday and the central
seat of the fugitive Girondins, established permanent obedience
through the moderation he had shown and the promises he had kept.[75]
The measures that had pacified the most compromised province would
have brought back the others, and through this policy, Paris, without
striking a blow, would have secured the three largest cities in
France, the capital of the South-west, that of the South, and the
capital of the Center.

On the contrary, should Paris persist in imposing on them the
domination of its local Jacobins there was a risk of their being
thrown into the arms of the enemy. Rather than fall back into the
hands of the bandits who had ransomed and decimated them, Toulon,
starved out, was about to receive the English within its walls and
surrender to them the great arsenal of the South. Not less famished,
Bordeaux might be tempted to demand aid from another English fleet; a
few marches would brings the Piedmontese army to Lyons; France would
then b cut in two, while the plan of stirring up the South against the
North was proposed to the allies by the most clear-sighted of their
councilors.[76] Had this plan been carried out it is probably that the
country would have been lost. -- In any event, there was danger in
driving the insurgents to despair: for, between the unbridled
dictatorship of their victorious assassins and the musketry of the
besieging army, there could be no hesitation by men of any feeling; it
was better to be beaten on the ramparts than allow themselves to be
bound for the guillotine; brought to a stand under the scaffold, their
sole resource was to depend on themselves to the last. -- Thus,
through its unreasonableness, the "Mountain" condemns itself to a
number of sieges or blockades which lasted several months,[77] to
leaving Var and Savoy unprotected, to exhausting the arsenals, to
employing against Frenchmen[78] troops and munitions needed against
foreigners, and all this at the moment the foreigner was taking
Valenciennes[79] and Mayence, when thirty thousand royalist were
organizing in Lozére, when the great Vendean army was laying siege to
Nantes, when each new outbreak of fighting was threatening to connect
the flaming frontier with the conflagration in the Catholic
countries.[80] -- With a jet of cold water aptly directed, the
"Mountain" could extinguish the fires it had kindled in the great
republican towns; otherwise, nothing remained but to let them increase
at the risk of consuming the whole country, with no other hope than
that they might at last die out under a mass of ruins, and with no
other object but to rule over captives and the dead.

But this is precisely the Jacobin aim; for, he is not satisfied with
less than absolute submission ; he must rule at any cost, just as he
pleases, by fair means or foul, no matter over what ruins. A despot
by instinct and installation, his dogma has consecrated him King ; he
is King by natural and divine right, in the name of eternal verity,
the same as Philip II., enthroned by his religious system and blessed
by his Holy Office. Hence he can abandon no jot or title of his
authority without a sacrifice of principle, nor treat with rebels,
unless they surrender at discretion; simply for having risen against
legitimate authority, they are traitors and villains. And who are
greater rascals the renegades who, after three years of patient
effort, just as the sect finally reaches its goal, oppose its
accession to power![81] At Nîmes, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Toulon, and
Lyons, not only have they interfered with or arrested the blow which
Paris struck, but they have put down the aggressors, closed the club,
disarmed the fanatical and imprisoned the leading Maratists; and worse
still, at Lyons and at Toulon, five or six massacreurs, or promoters
of massacre, Châlier and Riard, Jassaud, Sylvestre and Lemaille,
brought before the courts, have been condemned and executed after a
trial in which all the forms were strictly adhered to. -- That is the
inexpiable crime; for, in this trial, the "Mountain" is involved; the
principles of Sylvestre and Châlier are its principles; what is
accomplished in Paris, they have attempted in the provinces; if they
are guilty, it is also guilty; it cannot tolerate their punishment
without assenting to its own punishment. Accordingly,

* it must proclaim them heroes and martyrs,

* it must canonize their memory,[82]

* it must avenge their tortures,

* it must resume and complete their assaults,

* it must restore their accomplices to their places,

* it must render them omnipotent,

* it must force each rebel city to accept the rule of its rabble and
villains.

It matters little whether the Jacobins be a minority, whether at
Bordeaux, they have but four out of twenty-eight sections on their
side, at Marseilles five out of thirty-two, whether at Lyons they can
count up only fifteen hundred devoted adherents.[83] Suffrages are
not reckoned, but weighed, for legality is founded, not on numbers,
but on patriotism, the sovereign people being composed wholly of sans-
culottes. So much the worse for towns where the anti-revolutionary
majority is so great; they are only more dangerous; under the
republican demonstrations is concealed the hostility of old parties
and of the "suspect" classes, the Moderates, the Feuillants and
Royalists, merchants, men of the legal profession, property-owners and
muscadins.[84] These towns are nests of reptiles and must be crushed
out.

IX.

Destruction of Rebel Cities. -- Bordeaux. -- Marseilles. -- Lyons.-
- Toulon.

Consequently, obedient or disobedient, they are crushed out. They are
declared traitors to the country, not merely the members of the
departmental committees, but, at Bordeaux, all who have "aided or
abetted the Committee of Public Safety;" at Lyons, all administrators,
functionaries, military or civil officers who "convoked or tolerated
the Rhône-et-Loire congress," and furthermore, "every individual whose
son, clerk, servant, or even day-laborer, may have borne arms or
contributed the means of resistance," that is to say, the entire
National Guard who took up arms, and nearly all the population which
gave its money or voted in the sections.[85] -- By virtue of this
decree, all are "outlaws," or, in other words subject to the
guillotine just on the establishment of their identity, and their
property confiscated. Consequently, at Bordeaux, where not a gun had
been fired, the mayor Saige, and principal author of the submission,
is at once led to the scaffold without any form of trial,[86] while
eight hundred and eighty-one others succeed him amidst the solemn
silence of a dismayed population.[87] Two hundred prominent merchants
are arrested in one night; more than fifteen hundred persons are
imprisoned; all who are well off are ransomed, even those against who
no political charge could be made; nine millions of fines are levied
against "rich egoists." One of these,[88] accused of "indifference and
moderatism," pays twenty thousand francs "not to be harnessed to the
car of the Revolution;" another "convicted of having shown contempt
for his section and for the poor by giving thirty livres per months,"
is taxed at one million two hundred thousand livres, while the new
authorities, a crooked mayor and twelve knaves composing the
Revolutionary Committee, traffic in lives and property.89 At
Marseilles, says Danton,[90] the object is "to give the commercial
aristocracy an important lesson;" we must "show ourselves as terrible
to traders as to nobles and priests;" consequently, twelve thousand of
them are proscribed and their possessions sold.[91] From the first day
the guillotine works as fast as possible; nevertheless, it does not
work fast enough for Representative Fréron who finds the means for
making it work faster.

"The military commission we have established in place of the
revolutionary tribunal," he writes, "works frightfully fast against
the conspirators. . . . They fall like hail under the sword of the
law. Fourteen have already paid for their infamous treachery with
their heads. To-morrow, sixteen more are to be guillotined, all
chiefs of the legion, notaries, sectionists, members of the popular
tribunal; to-morrow, also, three merchants will dance the carmagnole,
and they are the ones we are after."[92]

Men and things, all must perish; he wishes to demolish the city and
proposes to fill up the harbor. Restrained with great difficulty,
Fréron contents himself with a destruction of "the haunts" of the
aristocracy, two churches, the concert-hall, the houses around it, and
twenty-three buildings in which the rebel sections had held their
meetings.

At Lyons, to increase the booty, the representatives had taken pains
to encourage the manufacturers and merchants with vague promises;
these opened their shops and brought their valuable goods, books and
papers out of their hiding-places. No time is lost in seizing the
plunder; "a list of all property belonging to the rich and to anti-
revolutionaries" is drawn up, which is "confiscated for the benefit of
the patriots of the city;" in addition to this a tax of six millions
is imposed, payable in eight days, by those whom the confiscation may
have still spared;[93] it is proclaimed, according to principle, that
the surplus of each individual belongs by right to the sans-culottes,
and whatever may have been retained beyond the strictly necessary, is
a robbery by the individual to the detriment of the nation.[94] In
conformity with this rule there is a general rounding up, prolonged
for ten months, which places the fortunes of a city of one hundred and
twenty thousand souls in the hands of its scoundrels. Thirty-two
revolutionary committees "whose members are thick as thieves select
thousands of guards devoted to them."[95] In confiscated dwellings
and warehouses, they affix seals without an inventory; they drive out
women and children "so that there shall be no witnesses;" they keep
the keys; they enter and steal when they please, or install themselves
for a revel with prostitutes. -- Meanwhile, the guillotine is kept
going, and people are fired at and shot down with grape-shot. The
revolutionary committee officially avow one thousand six hundred and
eighty-two acts of murder committed in five months,[96] while a
confederate of Robespierre's privately declare that there were six
thousand.[97]

Blacksmiths are condemned to death for having shod the Lyonnese
cavalry, firemen for having extinguished fires kindled by republican
bombshells, a widow for having paid a war-tax during the siege, market
women for "having shown disrespect to patriots." It is an organized
"Septembrisade" made legal and lasting; its authors are so well aware
of the fact as to use the word itself in their public
correspondence.[98] -- At Toulon it is worse, people are slaughtered
in heaps, almost haphazard. Notwithstanding that the inhabitants the
most compromised, to the number of four thousand, take refuge on board
English vessels, the whole city, say the representatives, is guilty.
Four hundred workmen in the navy-yard having marched out to meet
Fréron, he reminds them that they kept on working during the English
occupation of the town, and he has them put to death on the spot. An
order is issued to all "good citizens to assemble in the Champ de Mars
on penalty of death." They come there to the number of three thousand;
Fréron, on horseback, surrounded by cannon and troops, arrives with
about a hundred Maratists, the former accomplices of Lemaille,
Sylvestre, and other well-known assassins, who form a body of local
auxiliaries and counselors; he tells them to select out of the crowd
at pleasure according to their grudge, fancy, or caprice; all who are
designated are ranged along a wall and shot. The next morning, and on
the following days, the operation is renewed: Fréron writes on the
16th of Nivose that "eight hundred Toulonese have already been shot."
. . . "A volley of musketry," says he, in another letter, and after
that, volley after volley, until "the traitors are all gone." Then,
for three months after this, the guillotine dispatches eighteen
hundred persons; eleven young women have to mount the scaffold
together, in honor of a republican festival; an old woman of ninety-
four is borne to it in an armchair. The population, initially of
twenty-eight thousand people, is reduced to six or seven thousand
only.

All this is not enough; the two cities that dared maintain a siege
must disappear from the French soil. The Convention decrees that "the
city of Lyons shall be destroyed: every house occupied by a rich man
shall be demolished; only the dwellings of the poor shall remain, with
edifices specially devoted to industry, and monuments consecrated to
humanity and public education."[99] The same at Toulon: "the houses
within the town shall be demolished; only the buildings that are
essential for army and navy purposes, for stores and munitions, shall
be preserved."[100] Consequently, a requisition is made in Var and
the neighboring departments for twelve thousand masons to level Toulon
to the ground. -- At Lyons, fourteen thousand laborers pull down the
Chateau Pierre-Encize; also the superb houses on Place Bellecour,
those of the Quai St.-Clair, those of the Rues de Flandre and de
Bourgneuf, and many others; the cost of all this amounts to four
hundred thousand livres per decade; in six months the Republic expends
fifteen millions in destroying property valued at three or four
hundred millions, all belonging to the Republic.[101] Since the
Mongols of the fifth and thirteenth centuries, no such vast and
irrational waste had been seen -- such frenzy against the most
profitable fruits of industry and human civilization. -- Again, one
can understand how the Mongols, who were nomads, desired to convert
the soil into one vast steppe. But, to demolish a town whose arsenal
and harbor is maintained by it, to destroy the leaders of
manufacturing interests and their dwellings in a city where its
workmen and factories are preserved, to keep up a fountain and stop
the stream which flows from it, or the stream without the fountain, is
so absurd that the idea could only enter the head of a Jacobin. His
imagination has run so wild and his prevision become so limited that
he is no longer aware of contradictions; the ferocious stupidity of
the barbarian and the fixed idea of the inquisition meet on common
ground; the earth is not big enough for any but himself and the
orthodox of his species. Employing absurd, inflated and sinister
terms he decrees the extermination of heretics: not only shall their
monuments, dwellings and persons be destroyed, but every vestige of
them shall be eradicated and their names lost to the memory of
man.[102]