Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3)

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

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It is hardly possible even now for any one who exults in the memory of
the great deliverance of a brilliant and sociable people, to stand
unmoved before the walls of that palace which Philibert Delorme reared
for Catherine de' Medici, and which was thrown into ruin by the madness
of a band of desperate men in our own days. Lewis had walked forth from
the Tuileries on the fatal morning of the Tenth of August, holding his
children by the hand, and lightly noticing, as he traversed the gardens,
how early that year the leaves were falling. Lewis had by this time
followed the fallen leaves into nothingness. The palace of the kings was
now styled the Palace of the Nation, and the new republic carried on its
work surrounded by the outward associations of the old monarchy. The
Convention after the spring of 1793 held its sittings in what had
formerly been the palace theatre. Fierce men from the Faubourgs of St.
Antoine and St. Marceau, and fiercer women from the markets, shouted
savage applause or menace from galleries, where not so long ago the
Italian buffoons had amused the perpetual leisure of the finest ladies
and proudest grandees of France. The Committee of General Security
occupied the Pavillon de Marsan, looking over a dingy space that the
conqueror at Rivoli afterwards made the most dazzling street in Europe.
The Committee of Public Safety sat in the Pavillon de Flore, at the
opposite end of the Tuileries on the river bank. The approaches were
protected by guns and by a bodyguard, while inside there flitted to and
fro a cloud of familiars, who have been compared by the enemies of the
great Committee to the mutes of the court of the Grand Turk. Any one who
had business with this awful body had to grope his way along gloomy
corridors, that were dimly lighted by a single lamp at either end. The
room in which the Committee sat round a table of green cloth was
incongruously gay with the clocks, the bronzes, the mirrors, the
tapestries, of the ruined court. The members met at eight in the morning
and worked until one; from one to four they attended the sitting of the
Convention. In the evening they met again, and usually sat until night
was far advanced. It was no wonder if their hue became cadaverous, their
eyes hollow and bloodshot, their brows stern, their glance preoccupied
and sinister. Between ten and eleven every evening a sombre piece of
business was transacted, which has half effaced in the memory of
posterity all the heroic industry of the rest of the twenty-four hours.
It was then that Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor, brought an
account of his day's labour; how the revolutionary tribunal was working,
how many had been convicted and how many acquitted, how large or how
small 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 the
blood of the dead, its unheeding knife, neutral as the Fates.

Robespierre has been held responsible for all the violences of the
revolutionary government, and his position on the Committee appeared to
be exceedingly strong. It was, however, for a long time much less strong
in reality than it seemed: all depended upon successfully playing off
one force against another, and at the same time maintaining himself at
the centre of the see-saw. Robespierre was the literary and rhetorical
member of the band; he was the author of the strident manifestoes in
which Europe listened with exasperation to the audacious hopes and
unfaltering purpose of the new France. This had the effect of investing
him in the eyes of foreign nations with supreme and undisputed authority
over the government. The truth is, that Robespierre was both disliked
and despised by his colleagues. They thought of him as a mere maker of
useful phrases; he in turn secretly looked down upon them, as the man
who has a doctrine and a system in his head always looks down upon the
man who lives from hand to mouth. If the Committee had been in the place
of a government which has no opposition to fear, Robespierre would have
been one of its least powerful members. But although the government was
strong, there were at least three potent elements of opposition even
within the ranks of the dominant revolutionary party itself.

Three bodies in Paris were, each of them, the centre of an influence
that might at any moment become the triumphant rival of the Committee of
Public Safety. These bodies were, first, the Convention; second, the
Commune of Paris; and thirdly, the Jacobin Club. The jealousy thus
existing outside the Committee would have made any failure instantly
destructive. At one moment, at the end of 1793, it was only the
surrender of Toulon that saved the Committee from a hostile motion in
the Convention, and such a motion would have sent half of them to the
guillotine. They were reviled by the extreme party who ruled at the Town
Hall for not carrying the policy of extermination far enough. They were
reproached by Danton and his powerful section for carrying that policy
too far. They were discredited by the small band of intriguers, like
Bazire, who identified government with peculation. Finally, they were
haunted by the shadow of a fear, which events were by and by to prove
only too substantial, lest one of their military agents on the frontier
should make himself their master. The key to the struggle of the
factions between the winter of 1793 and the revolution of the summer of
1794 is the vigorous resolve of the governing Committees not to part
with power. The drama is one of the most exciting in the history of
faction; it abounds in rapid turns and unexpected shifts, upon which the
student may spend many a day and many a night, and after all he is
forced to leave off in despair of threading an accurate way through the
labyrinth of passion and intrigue. The broad traits of the situation,
however, are tolerably simple. The difficulty was to find a principle of
government which the people could be induced to accept. 'The rights of
men and the new principles of liberty and equality,' Burke said, 'were
very unhandy instruments for those who wished to establish a system of
tranquillity and order. The factions,' he added with fierce sarcasm,
'were to accomplish the purposes of order, morality, and submission to
the laws, from the principles of atheism, profligacy, and sedition. They
endeavoured to establish distinctions, by the belief of which they hoped
to keep the spirit of murder safely bottled up and sealed for their own
purposes, without endangering themselves by the fumes of the poison
which they prepared for their enemies.' This is a ferocious and
passionate version, but it is substantially not an unreal account of the
position.

Upon one point all parties agreed, and that was the necessity of
founding the government upon force, and force naturally meant Terror.
Their plea was that of Dido to Ilioneus and the stormbeaten sons of
Dardanus, when they complained that her people had drawn the sword upon
them, 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 cruelty
and clemency, and whether it be better to be loved or feared,
anticipates the defence of the Terrorists, in the maxim that for a new
prince it is impossible to avoid the name of cruel, because all new
states abound in many perils. The difference arose on the question when
Terror should be considered to have done as much of its work as it could
be expected to do. This difference again was connected with difference
of conception as to the type of the society which was ultimately to
emerge from the existing chaos. Billaud-Varennes, the guiding spirit of
the Committees, was without any conception of this kind. He was a man of
force pure and simple. Danton was equally untouched by dreams of social
transformation; his philosophy, so far as he had a definite philosophy,
was, in spite of one or two inconsistent utterances, materialistic: and
materialism, when it takes root in a sane, perspicacious, and indulgent
character, as in the case of Danton, and, to take a better-known
example, in the case of Jefferson, usually leads to a sound and positive
theory of politics; chimeras have no place in it, though a rational
social hope has the first place of all. Neither Danton nor Billaud
expected a millennium; their only aim was to shape France into a
coherent political personality, and the war between them turned upon the
policy of prolonging the Terror after the frontiers had been saved and
the risings in the provinces put down. There were, however, two parties
who took the literature of the century in earnest; they thought that the
hour had struck for translating, one of them, the sentimentalism of
Rousseau, 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 of
Chaumette was the reproduction, under the shadow of the guillotine, of
the great literary strife of a quarter of a century before between Jean
Jacques and the writers whom he contemptuously styled Holbachians. The
battle of the books had become a battle between bands of infuriated men.
The struggle between Hebert and Chaumette and the Common Council of
Paris on the one part, and the Committee and Robespierre on the other,
was the concrete form of the deepest controversy that lies before modern
society. Can the social union subsist without a belief in God? Chaumette
answered Yes, and Robespierre cried No. Robespierre followed Rousseau in
thinking that any one who should refuse to recognise the existence of a
God, should be exiled as a monster devoid of the faculties of virtue and
sociability. Chaumette followed Diderot, and Diderot told Samuel Romilly
in 1783 that belief in God, as well as submission to kings, would be at
an end all over the world in a very few years. The Hebertists might have
taken for their motto Diderot's shocking couplet, if they could have
known it, about using

Les entrailles du pretre
Au defaut d'un cordon pour etrangler les rois.

The theists and the atheists, Chaumette and Robespierre, each of them
accepted the doctrine that it was in the power of the armed legislator
to impose any belief and any rites he pleased upon the country at his
feet. The theism or the atheism of the new France depended, as they
thought, on the issue of the war for authority between the Hebertists in
the Common Council of Paris, and the Committee of Public Safety. That
was the religious side of the attitude of the government to the
opposition, and it is the side that possesses most historic interest.
Billaud cared very little for religion in any way; his quarrel with the
Commune and with Hebert was political. What Robespierre's drift appears
to have been, was to use the political animosity of the Committee as a
means of striking foes, against whom his own animosity was not only
political but religious also.

It would doubtless show a very dull apprehension of the violence and
confusion of the time, to suppose that even Robespierre, with all his
love for concise theories, was accustomed to state his aim to himself
with the definite neatness in which it appears when reduced to literary
statement. Pedant as he was, he was yet enough of a politician to see
the practical urgency of restoring material order, whatever spiritual
belief or disbelief might accompany it. The prospect of a rallying point
for material order was incessantly changing; and Robespierre turned to
different quarters in search of it almost from week to week. He was only
able to exert a certain limited authority over his colleagues in the
government, by virtue of his influence over the various sections of
possible opposition, and this was a moral, and not an official,
influence. It was acquired not by marked practical gifts, for in truth
Robespierre did not possess them, but by his good character, by his
rhetoric, and by the skill with which he kept himself prominently before
the public eye. The effective seat of his power, notwithstanding many
limits and incessant variations, was the Jacobin Club. There a speech
from him threw his listeners into ecstasies, that have been
disrespectfully compared to the paroxysms of Jansenist convulsionaries,
or the hysterics of Methodist negroes on a cotton plantation. We
naturally think of those grave men who a few years before had founded
the republic in America. Jefferson served with Washington in the
Virginian legislature and with Franklin in Congress, and he afterwards
said that he never heard either of them speak ten minutes at a time;
while John Adams declared that he never heard Jefferson utter three
sentences together. Of Robespierre it is stated on good authority that
for eighteen months there was not a single evening on which he did not
make to the assembled Jacobins at least one speech, and that never a
short one.

Strange as it may seem, Robespierre's credit with this grim assembly was
due to his truly Philistine respectability and to his literary faculty.
He figured as the philosopher and bookman of the party: the most
iconoclastic politicians are usually willing to respect the scholar,
provided they are sure of his being on their side. Robespierre had from
the first discountenanced the fantastic caprices of some too excitable
allies. He distrusted the noisy patriots of the middle class, who
curried favour with the crowd by clothing themselves in coarse garments,
clutching a pike, and donning the famous cap of red woollen, which had
been the emblem of the emancipation of a slave in ancient Rome. One
night at the Jacobin Club, Robespierre mounted the tribune, dressed with
his usual elaborate neatness, and still wearing powder in his hair. An
onlooker unceremoniously planted on the orator's head the red cap
demanded by revolutionary etiquette. Robespierre threw the sacred symbol
on the ground with a severe air, and then proceeded with a discourse of
much austerity. Not that he was averse to a certain seemly decoration,
or to the embodiment of revolutionary sentiment by means of a symbolism
that strikes our cooler imagination as rather puerile. He was as ready
as 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 the
Revolution was the death of Barra. This was a child of thirteen who
enrolled himself as a drummer, and marched with the Blues to suppress
the rebel Whites in La Vendee. One day he advanced too close to the
enemy's post, intrepidly beating the charge. He was surrounded, but the
peasant soldiers were loth to strike, 'Cry _Long live the King!_' they
shouted, 'or else death!' 'Long live the Republic!' was the poor little
hero's answer, as a ball pierced his heart. Robespierre described the
incident to the Convention, and amid prodigious enthusiasm demanded that
the body of the young martyr of liberty should be transported to the
Pantheon with special pomp, and that David, the artist of the
Revolution, should be charged with the duty of devising and embellishing
the festival. As it happened, the arrangements were made for the
ceremony to take place on the Tenth of Thermidor--a day on which
Robespierre and all Paris were concerned about a celebration of bloodier
import. Thermidor, however, was still far off; and the red sun of
Jacobin enthusiasm seemed as if it would shine unclouded for ever.

Even at the Jacobins, however, popular as he was, Robespierre felt every
instant the necessity of walking cautiously. He was as far removed as
possible from that position of Dictator which some historians with a
wearisome iteration persist in ascribing to him, even at the moment when
they are enumerating the defeats which the party of Hebert was able to
inflict upon him in the very bosom of the Mother Club itself. They make
him the sanguinary dictator in one sentence, and the humiliated
intriguer in the next. The latter is much the more correct account of
the two, if we choose to call a man an intriguer who was honestly
anxious to suppress what he considered a wicked faction, and yet had
need of some dexterity to keep his own head upon his shoulders.

* * * * *

In the winter of 1793 the Municipal party, guided by Hebert and
Chaumette, made their memorable attempt to extirpate Christianity in
France. The doctrine of D'Holbach's supper-table had for a short space
the arm of flesh and the sword of the temporal power on its side. It was
the first appearance of dogmatic atheism in Europe as a political force.
This makes it one of the most remarkable moments in the Revolution, just
as it makes the Revolution itself the most remarkable moment in modern
history. The first political demonstration of atheism was attended by
some of the excesses, the folly, the extravagances that stained the
growth of Christianity. On the whole it is a very mild story compared
with the atrocities of the Jewish records or the crimes of Catholicism.
The worst charge against the party of Chaumette is that they were
intolerant, and the charge is deplorably true; but this charge cannot
lie in the mouth of persecuting churches.

Historical recriminations, however, are not very edifying. It is
perfectly fair when Catholics talk of the atheist Terror, to rejoin that
the retainers of Anjou and Montpensier slew more men and women on the
first day of the Saint Bartholomew than perished in Paris through the
Years I. and II. But the retort does us no good beyond the region of
dialectic; it rather brings us down to the level of the poor sectaries
whom it crushes. Let us raise ourselves into clearer air. The fault of
the atheist is that they knew no better than to borrow the maxims of the
churchmen; and even those who agree with the dogmatic denials of the
atheists--if such there be--ought yet to admit that the mere change from
superstition to reason is a small gain, if the conclusions of reason are
still to be enforced by the instruments of superstition. Our opinions
are less important than the spirit and temper with which they possess
us, and even good opinions are worth very little unless we hold them in
a broad, intelligent, and spacious way. Now some of the opinions of
Chaumette were full of enlightenment and hope. He had a generous and
vivid faith in humanity, and he showed the natural effect of abandoning
belief in another life by his energetic interest in arrangements for
improving the lot of man in this life. But it would be far better to
share the superstitious opinions of a virtuous and benignant priest like
the Bishop in Victor Hugo's _Miserables_, than to hold those good
opinions of Chaumette as he held them, with a rancorous intolerance, a
reckless disregard of the rights and feelings of others, and a shallow
forgetfulness of all that great and precious part of our natures that
lies out of the immediate domain of the logical understanding. One can
understand how an honest man would abhor the darkness and tyranny of the
Church. But then to borrow the same absolutism in the interests of new
light, was inevitably to bring the new light into the same abhorrence
as had befallen the old system of darkness. And this is exactly what
happened. In every family where a mother sought to have her child
baptized, or where sons and daughters sought to have the dying spirit of
the old consoled by the last sacrament, there sprang up a bitter enemy
to the government which had closed the churches and proscribed the
priests.

How could a society whose spiritual life had been nourished in the
solemn mysticism of the Middle Ages, suddenly turn to embrace a gaudy
paganism? The common self-respect of humanity was outraged by apostate
priests who, whether under the pressure of fear of Chaumette, or in a
very superfluity of folly and ecstasy of degradation, hastened to
proclaim the charlatanry of their past lives, as they filed before the
Convention, led by the Archbishop of Paris, and accompanied by rude
acolytes bearing piles of the robes and the vessels of silver and gold
with which they had once served their holy offices. 'Our enemies,'
Voltaire had said, 'have always on their side the fat of the land, the
sword, the strong box, and the _canaille_.' For a moment all these
forces were on the other side, and it is deplorable to think that they
were as much abused by their new masters as by the old. The explanation
is that the destructive party had been brought up in the schools of the
ecclesiastical party, and their work was a mere outbreak of mutiny, not
a grave and responsible attempt to lead France to a worthier faith. If,
as Chaumette believed, mankind are the only Providence of men, surely
in that faith more than in any other are we bound to be very solicitous
not to bring the violent hand of power on any of the spiritual
acquisitions of the race, and very patient in dealing with the slowness
of the common people to leave their outworn creeds.

Instead of defying the Church by the theatrical march of the Goddess of
Reason under the great sombre arches of the Cathedral of Our Lady,
Chaumette should have found comfort in a firm calculation of the
conditions. 'You,' he might have said to the priests,--'you have so
debilitated 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 the
yoke of your superstition. But we promise you that they shall be
generations of strenuous battle. We give you all the advantages that you
can get from the sincerity and pious worth of the good and simple among
you. We give you all that the bad among you may get by resort to the
poisoned weapons of your profession and its traditions,--its bribes to
mental indolence, its hypocritical affectations in the pulpit, its
tyranny in the closet, its false speciousness in the world, its menace
at the deathbed. With all these you may do your worst, and still
humanity will escape you; still the conscience of the race will rise
away from you; still the growth of brighter ideals and a nobler purpose
will go on, leaving ever further and further behind them your dwarfed
finality and leaden moveless stereotype. We shall pass you by on your
flank; your fieriest darts will only spend themselves on air. We will
not attack you as Voltaire did; we will not exterminate you; we shall
explain you. History will place your dogma in its class, above or below
a hundred competing dogmas, exactly as the naturalist classifies his
species. From being a conviction, it will sink to a curiosity; from
being the guide to millions of human lives, it will dwindle down to a
chapter in a book. As History explains your dogma, so Science will dry
it up; the conception of law will silently make the conception of the
daily miracle of your altars seem impossible; the mental climate will
gradually deprive your symbols of their nourishment, and men will turn
their backs on your system, not because they have confuted it, but
because, like witchcraft or astrology, it has ceased to interest them.
The great ship of your Church, once so stout and fair and well laden
with 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 than
ghosts of dead men, and at the hour when you seem to have reached the
bay, down your ship will sink like lead or like stone to the deepest
bottom.'

Alas, the speculation of the century had not rightly attuned men's minds
to this firm confidence in the virtue of liberty, sounding like a bell
through all distractions. None of these high things were said. The
temples were closed, the sacred symbols defiled, the priests
maltreated, the worshippers dispersed. The Commune of Paris imitated the
policy of the King of France who revoked the Edict of Nantes, and
democratic 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 afflicted
him sorely as an ardent disciple of the Savoyard Vicar. Hebert, however,
was so strong that it needed some courage to attack him, nor did
Robespierre dare to withstand him to the face. But he did not flinch
from making an energetic assault upon atheism and the excesses of its
partisans. His admirers usually count his speech of the Twenty-first of
November one of the most admirable of his oratorical successes. The
Sphinx still sits inexorable at our gates, and his words have lost none
of their interest. 'Every philosopher and every individual,' he said,
'may adopt whatever opinion he pleases about atheism. Any one who wishes
to make such an opinion into a crime is an insensate; but the public man
or the legislator who should adopt such a system, would be a hundred
times more insensate still. The National Convention abhors it. The
Convention is not the author of a scheme of metaphysics. It was not to
no purpose that it published the Declaration of the Rights of Man in
presence of the Supreme Being. I shall be told perhaps that I have a
narrow intelligence, that I am a man of prejudice, and a fanatic. I
have already said that I spoke neither as an individual nor as a
philosopher with a system, but as a representative of the people.
_Atheism is aristocratic. The idea of a great being who watches over
oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is essentially the
idea of the people._ This is the sentiment of Europe and the Universe;
it is the sentiment of the French nation. That people is attached
neither to priests, nor to superstition, nor to ceremonies; it is
attached only to worship in itself, or in other words to the idea of an
incomprehensible Power, the terror of wrongdoers, the stay and comfort
of virtue, to which it delights to render words of homage that are all
so many anathemas against injustice and triumphant crime.'

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