Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3)

J >> John Morley >> Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3)

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Robespierre's life was frugal and simple, as must always be seemly in
the spokesman of the dumb multitude whose lives are very hard. He had a
single room in the house of Duplay, at the extreme west end of the long
Rue Saint Honore, half a mile from the Jacobin Club, and less than that
from the Riding School of the Tuileries, where the Constituent and
Legislative Assemblies held session. His room, which served him for
bed-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, a
sworn follower of Robespierre, and the whole family cherished their
guest as if he had been a son and a brother. Between him and the eldest
daughter of the house there grew up a more tender sentiment, and
Robespierre looked forward to the joys of the hearth, so soon as his
country should be delivered from the oppressors without and the traitors
within.

Eagerly as Robespierre delighted in his popularity, he intended it to
be a force and not a decoration. An occasion of testing his influence
arose in the winter of 1791. The situation had become more and more
difficult. The court was more disloyal and more perverse, as its hopes
that the nightmare would come to an end became fainter. In the summer of
1791, the German Emperor, the King of Prussia, and minor champions of
retrograde causes issued the famous Declaration of Pilnitz. The menace
of intervention was the one element needed to make the position of the
monarchy desperate. It roused France to fever heat. For along with the
foreign kings were the French princes of the blood and the French
nobles. In the spring of 1792, the Assembly forced the King to declare
war against Austria. Robespierre, in spite of the strong tide of warlike
feeling, led the Jacobin opposition to the war. This is one of the most
sagacious acts of his career, for the hazards of the conflict were
terrible. If the foreigners and the emigrant nobles were victorious, all
that the Revolution had won would be instantly and irretrievably lost.
If, on the other hand, the French armies were victorious, one of two
disasters might follow. Either the troops might become a weapon in the
hands of the court and the reactionary party, for the suppression of all
the progressive parties alike; or else their general might make himself
supreme. Robespierre divined, what the Girondins did not, that Narbonne
and the court, in accepting the cry for war, were secretly designing,
first, to crush the faction of emigrant nobles, then to make the King
popular at home, and thus finally to construct a strong royalist army.
The Constitutional party in the Legislative Assembly had the same ideas
as Narbonne. The Girondins sought war; first, from a genuine, if not a
profoundly wise, enthusiasm for liberty, which they would fain have
spread all over the world; and next, because they thought that war would
increase their popularity, and give them decisive control of the
situation.

The first effect of the war declared in April 1792 was to shake down the
throne. Operations had no sooner begun than the King became an object of
bitter and amply warranted suspicion. Neither the leaders nor the people
had forgotten his flight a year before to place himself at the head of
the foreign invaders, nor the letter that he had left behind him for the
National Assembly, protesting against all that had been done. They were
again reminded of what short shrift they might expect if the King's
friends should come back. The Duke of Brunswick at the head of the
foreign army set out on his march, and issued his famous proclamation to
the inhabitants of France. He demanded immediate and unconditional
submission; he threatened with fire and sword every town, village, or
hamlet, that should dare to defend itself; and finally, he swore that if
the smallest violence or insult were done to the King or his family, the
city of Paris should be handed over to military execution and absolute
destruction. This insensate document bears marks in every line of the
implacable hate and burning thirst for revenge that consumed the
aristocratic refugees. Only civil war can awaken such rage as
Brunswick's manifesto betrayed. It was drawn up by the French nobles at
Coblenz. He merely signed it. The reply to it was the memorable
insurrection of the Tenth of August 1792. The King was thrown into
prison, and the Legislative Assembly made way for the National
Convention.

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 in
a constitutional sense. M. d'Hericault believes a story that
Robespierre's aim in this had been to have himself accepted as tutor for
the young Dauphin. It is impossible to prove a negative, but we find
great difficulty in believing that such a post could ever have been an
object of Robespierre's ambition. Now and always he showed a rather
singular preference for the substance of power over its glitter. He was
vain and an egoist, but in spite of this, and in spite of his passion
for empty phrases, he was not without a sense of reality.

The insurrection of the 10th of August, however, was the idea, not of
Robespierre, but of a more commanding personage, who now became one of
the foremost of the Jacobin chiefs. De Maistre, that ardent champion of
reaction, found a striking argument for the presence of the divine hand
in the Revolution, in the intense mediocrity of the revolutionary
leaders. How could such men, he asked, have achieved such results, if
they had not been instruments of the directing will of heaven? Danton at
any rate is above this caustic criticism. Danton was of the Herculean
type of a Luther, though without Luther's deep vision of spiritual
things; or a Chatham, though without Chatham's august majesty of life;
or a Cromwell, though without Cromwell's calm steadfastness of patriotic
purpose. His visage and port seemed to declare his character: dark
overhanging brows; eyes that had the gleam of lightning; a savage mouth;
an immense head; the voice of a Stentor. Madame Roland pictured him as a
fiercer Sardanapalus. Artists called him Jove the Thunderer. His enemies
saw in him the Satan of the Paradise Lost. He was no moral regenerator;
the difference between him and Robespierre is typified in Danton's
version of an old saying, that he who hates vices hates men. He was not
free from that careless life-contemning desperation, which sometimes
belongs to forcible natures. Danton cannot be called noble, because
nobility implies a purity, an elevation, and a kind of seriousness which
were not his. He was too heedless of his good name, and too blind to the
truth that though right and wrong may be near neighbours, yet the line
that separates them is of an awful sacredness. If Robespierre passed for
a hypocrite by reason of his scruple, Danton seemed a desperado by his
airs of 'immoral thoughtlessness.' But the world forgives much to a
royal size, and Danton was one of the men who strike deep notes. He had
that 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-sounding
phrases of an epoch that was only too rich in them, yet phrases had no
empire over him; he was their master, not their dupe. Of all the men who
succeeded Mirabeau as directors of the unchained forces, we feel that
Danton alone was in his true element. Action, which poisoned the blood
of such men as Robespierre, and drove such men as Vergniaud out of their
senses with exaltation, was to Danton his native sphere. When France was
for a moment discouraged, it was he who nerved her to new effort by the
electrifying cry, '_We must dare, and again dare, and without end
dare!_' If his rivals or his friends seemed too intent on trifles, too
apt to confound side issues with the central aim of the battle, Danton
was ever ready to urge them to take a juster measure:--'_When the
edifice is all ablaze, I take little heed of the knaves who are
pilfering the household goods; I rush to put out the flames._' When base
egoism was compromising a cause more priceless than the personality of
any man, it was Danton who made them ashamed by the soul-inspiring
exclamation, '_Let my name be blotted out and my memory perish, if only
France may be free._' The Girondins denounced the popular clubs of Paris
as hives of lawlessness and outrage. Danton warned them that it were
wiser to go to these seething societies and to guide them, than to waste
breath in futile denunciation. 'A nation in revolution,' he cried to
them, in a superb figure, 'is like the bronze boiling and foaming and
purifying 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 will
surely scorch you.' If there was murderous work below the hatches, that
was all the more reason why the steersman should keep his hand strong
and ready on the wheel, with an eye quick for each new drift in the
hurricane, and each new set in the raging currents. This is ever the
figure under which one conceives Danton--a Titanic shape doing battle
with the fury of the seas, yielding while flood upon flood sweeps wildly
over him, and then with unshaken foothold and undaunted front once more
surveying the waste of waters, and striving with dexterous energy to
force the straining vessel over the waters of the bar.

La Fayette had called the huge giant of popular force from its squalid
lurking-places, and now he trembled before its presence, and fled from
it shrieking, with averted hands. Marat thrust swords into the giant's
half-unwilling grasp, and plied him with bloody incitement to slay hip
and thigh, and so filled the land with a horror that has not faded from
out of men's minds to this day. Danton instantly discerned that the
problem was to preserve revolutionary energy, and still to persuade the
insurgent forces to retire once more within their boundaries.
Robespierre discerned this too, but he was paralysed and bewildered by
his own principles, as the convinced doctrinaire is so apt to be amid
the perplexities of practice. The teaching of Rousseau was ever pouring
like thin smoke among his ideas, and clouding his view of actual
conditions. The Tenth of August produced a considerable change in
Robespierre's point of view. It awoke him to the precipitous steepness
of the slope down which the revolutionary car was rushing headlong. His
faith in the infallibility of the people suffered no shock, but he was
in a moment alive to the need of walking warily, and his whole march
from now until the end, twenty-three months later, became timorous,
cunning, and oblique. His intelligence seemed to move in subterranean
tunnels, with the gleam of an equivocal premiss at one end, and the mist
of 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 of
his paradise proved to be a ruffian with a pike. The shock must have
been tremendous. Robespierre did not quail nor retreat; he only revised
his notion of the situation. A curious interview once took place between
him and Marat. Robespierre began by assuring the Friend of the People
that he quite understood the atrocious demands for blood with which the
columns of Marat's newspaper were filled, to be merely useful
exaggerations of his real designs. Marat repelled the disparaging
imputation of clemency and common sense, and talked in his familiar vein
of poniarding brigands, burning despots alive in their palaces, and
impaling the traitors of the Assembly on their own benches.
'Robespierre,' says Marat, 'listened to me with affright; he turned pale
and said nothing. The interview confirmed the opinion I had always had
of him, that he united the integrity of a thoroughly honest man and the
zeal of a good patriot, with the enlightenment of a wise senator, but
that he was without either the views or the audacity of a real
statesman.' The picture is instructive, for it shows us Robespierre's
invariable habit of leaving violence and iniquity unrebuked; of
conciliating the practitioners of violence and iniquity; and of
contenting himself with an inward hope of turning the world into a right
course by fine words. He had no audacity in Marat's sense, but he was no
coward. He knew, as all these men knew, that almost from hour to hour he
carried his life in his hand, yet he declined to seek shelter in the
obscurity which saved such men as Sieyes. But if he had courage, he had
not the initiative of a man of action. He invented none of the ideas or
methods of the Revolution, not even the Reign of Terror, but he was very
dexterous in accepting or appropriating what more audacious spirits than
himself had devised and enforced. The pedant, cursed with the ambition
to be a ruler of men, is a curious study. He would be glad not to go too
far, and yet his chief dread is lest he be left behind. His
consciousness of pure aims allows him to become an accomplice in the
worst crimes. Suspecting himself at bottom to be a theorist, he hastens
to clear his character as man of practice by conniving at an enormity.
Thus, in September 1792, a band of miscreants committed the grievous
massacres in the prisons of Paris. Robespierre, though the best evidence
goes to show that he not only did not abet the prison murders, but in
his heart deplored them, yet after the event did not scruple to justify
what had been done. This was the beginning of a long course of
compliance with sanguinary misdeeds, for which Robespierre has been as
hotly execrated as if he prompted them. We do not, for the moment,
measure the relative degrees of guilt that attached to mere compliance
on the one hand, and cruel origination on the other. But his position in
the Revolution is not rightly understood, unless we recognise him as
being 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 the
repulse of the invaders, the suppression of an extensive civil war, and
the attempted reconstruction of a social framework. The other comprises
the rapid phases of an internecine struggle of violent and short-lived
factions. By an unhappy fatality, due partly to anti-democratic
prejudice, and partly to men's unfailing passion for melodrama, the
Reign of Terror has been popularly taken for the central and most
important part of the revolutionary epic. This is nearly as absurd as it
would be to make Gustave Flourens' manifestation of the Fifth of
October, or the rising of the Thirty-first of October, the most
prominent features in a history of the war of French defence in our own
day. In truth, the Terror was a mere episode; and just as the rising of
October 1870 was due to Marshal Bazaine's capitulation at Metz, it is
easy to see that, with one exception, every violent movement in Paris,
from 1792 to 1794, was due to menace or disaster on the frontier. Every
one of the famous days of Paris was an answer to some enemy without. The
storm of the Tuileries on the Tenth of August, as we have already said,
was the response to Brunswick's proclamation. The bloody days of
September were the reaction of panic at the capture of Longwy and Verdun
by the Prussians. The surrender of Cambrai provoked the execution of
Marie Antoinette. The defeat of Aix-la-Chapelle produced the abortive
insurrection of the Tenth of March; and the treason of Dumouriez, the
reverses of Custine, and the rebellion in La Vendee, produced the
effectual insurrection of the Thirty-first of May 1793. The last of
these two risings of Paris, headed by the Commune, against the
Convention which was until then controlled by the Girondins, at length
gave the government of France and the defence of the Revolution
definitely over to the Jacobins. Their patriotic dictatorship lasted
unbroken for a short period of ten months, and then the great party
broke up into factions. The splendid triumphs of the dictatorship have
been, in England at any rate, too usually forgotten, and only the crimes
of the factions remembered. Robespierre's history unfortunately belongs
to the less important battle.

II

The Girondins were driven out of the Convention by the insurgent
Parisians at the beginning of June 1793. The movement may be roughly
compared to that of the Independents in our own Rebellion, when the army
compelled the withdrawal of eleven of the Presbyterian leaders from the
parliament; or, it may recall Pride's memorable Purge of the same famous
assembly. Both cases illustrate the common truth that large deliberative
bodies, be they never so excellent for purposes of legislation, and even
for a general control of the executive government in ordinary times, are
found to be essentially unfit for directing a military crisis. If there
are any historic examples that at first seem to contradict such a
proposition, it will be found that the bodies in question were close
aristocracies, like the Great Council of Venice, or the Senate of Rome
in the strong days of the Commonwealth; they were never the creatures of
popular election, with varying aims and a diversified political spirit.
Modern publicists have substituted the divine right of assemblies for
the old divine right of monarchies. Those who condone the violence done
to the King on the Tenth of August, and even acquiesce in his execution
five months afterwards, are relentless against the violence done to the
Convention on the Thirty-first of May. We confess ourselves unable to
follow this transfer of the superstition of sacrosanctity from a king to
a chamber. No doubt, the sooner a nation acquires a settled government,
the better for it, provided the government be efficient. But if it be
not efficient, the mischief of actively suppressing it may well be fully
outweighed by the mischief of retaining it. We have no wish to smooth
over the perversities of a revolutionary time; they cost a nation very
dear; but if all the elements of the state are in furious convulsion and
uncontrollable effervescence, then it is childish to measure the march
of events by the standard of happier days of social peace and political
order. The prospect before France at the violent close of Girondin
supremacy was as formidable as any nation has ever yet had to confront
in the history of the world. Rome was not more critically placed when
the defeat of Varro on the plain of Cannae had broken up her alliances
and ruined her army. The brave patriots of the Netherlands had no
gloomier outlook at that dolorous moment when the Prince of Orange had
left 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 other
Jacobin leaders had now to face. In the north-west one division of the
fugitive Girondins was forming an army at Caen; in the south-west
another division was doing the same at Bordeaux. Marseilles and Lyons
were rallying all the disaffected and reactionary elements in the
south-east. La Vendee had flamed out in wild rebellion for Church and
King. The strong places on the north frontier, and the strong places on
the east, were in the hands of the foreign enemy. The fate of the
Revolution lay in the issue of a struggle between Paris, with less than
a score of departments on her side, and all the rest of France and the
whole European coalition marshalled against her. And even this was not
the worst. In Paris itself a very considerable proportion of its
half-million of inhabitants were disaffected to the revolutionary cause.
Reactionary historians dwell on the fact that such risings as that of
the Tenth of August were devised by no more than half of the sections
into which Paris was divided. It was common, they say, for half a dozen
individuals to take upon themselves to represent the fourteen or fifteen
hundred other members of a section. But what better proof can we have
that if France was to be delivered from restored feudalism and foreign
spoliation, the momentous task must be performed by those who had sense
to discern the awful peril, and energy to encounter it?

The Girondins had made their incapacity plain. The execution of the King
had filled them with alarm, and with hatred against the ruder and more
robust party who had forced that startling act of vengeance upon them.
Puny social disgusts prevented them from co-operating with Danton or
with Robespierre. Prussia and Austria were not more redoubtable or more
hateful to them than was Paris, and they wasted, in futile
recriminations about the September massacres or the alleged peculations
of municipal officers, the time and the energy that should have been
devoted without let or interruption to the settlement of the
administration and the repulse of the foe. It is impossible to think of
such fine characters as Vergniaud or Madame Roland without admiration,
or of their untimely fate without pity. But the deliverance of a people
beset by strong and implacable enemies could not wait on mere good
manners and fastidious sentiments, when these comely things were in
company with the most stupendous want of foresight ever shown by a
political party. How can we measure the folly of men who so missed the
conditions of the problem as to cry out in the Convention itself, almost
within earshot of the Jacobin Club, that if any insult were offered to
the national representation, the departments would rise, 'Paris would be
annihilated; and men would come to search on the banks of the Seine
whether such a city had ever existed!' It was to no purpose that Danton
urgently rebuked the senseless animosity with which the Right poured
incessant malediction on the Left, and the wild shrieking hate with
which the Left retaliated on the Right. The battle was to the death, and
it was the Girondins who first menaced their political foes with
vengeance and the guillotine. As it happened, the treason of Dumouriez
and their own ineptitude destroyed them before revenge was within reach.
Such a consummation was fortunate for their country. It was the
Girondins whose want of union and energy had by the middle of 1793
brought France to distraction and imminent ruin. It was a short year of
Jacobin government that by the summer of 1794 had welded the nation
together again, and finally conquered the invasion. The city of the
Seine 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 surest
bulwark.'

The immediate instrument of so rapid and extraordinary an achievement
was the Committee of Public Safety. The French have never shown their
quick genius for organisation with more triumphant vigour. While the
Girondins were still powerful, nine members of the Convention had been
constituted an executive committee, April 6, 1793. They were in fact a
kind of permanent cabinet, with practical irresponsibility. In the
summer of 1793 the number was increased from nine to twelve, and these
twelve were the centre of the revolutionary government. They fell into
three groups. First, there were the scientific or practical
administrators, of whom the most eminent was Carnot. Next came the
directors of internal policy, the pure revolutionists, headed by Billaud
de Varennes. Finally, there was a trio whose business it was to
translate action into the phrases of revolutionary policy. This famous
group was Robespierre, Couthon, and Saint Just.

Besides the Committee of Public Safety there was another chief
governmental committee, that of General Security. Its functions were
mainly connected with the police, the arrests, and the prisons, but in
all serious affairs the two Committees deliberated in common. There were
also fourteen other groups of various size, taken from the Convention;
they applied themselves with admirable zeal, and usually not with more
zeal than skill, to schemes of public instruction, of finance, of
legislation, of the administration of justice, and a host of other civil
reforms, of all of which Napoleon Bonaparte was by and by to reap the
credit. These bodies completed the civil revolution, which the
Constituent and the Legislative Assemblies had left so mischievously
incomplete that, as soon as ever the Convention had assembled, it was
besieged by a host of petitioners praying them to explain and to pursue
the abolition of the old feudal rights. Everything had still been left
uncertain in men's minds, even upon that greatest of all the
revolutionary questions. The feudal division of the committee of general
legislation had in this eleventh hour to decide innumerable issues, from
those of the widest practical importance, down to the prayer of a remote
commune to be relieved from the charge of maintaining a certain mortuary
lamp which had been a matter of seignorial obligation. The work done by
the radical jurisconsults was never undone. It was the great and
durable reward of the struggle. And we have to remember that these
industrious and efficient bodies, as well as all other public bodies and
functionaries whatever, were placed by the definite revolutionary
constitution of 1793 under the direct orders of the Committee of Public
Safety.

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