Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3)

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

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This is Robespierre's favourite attitude, the priest posing as
statesman. Like others, he declares the Supreme Power incomprehensible,
and then describes him in terms of familiar comprehension. He first
declares atheism an open choice, and then he brands it with the most
odious epithet in the accepted vocabulary of the hour. Danton followed
practically the same line, though saying much less about it. 'If
Greece,' he said in the Convention, 'had its Olympian games, France too
shall solemnise her sans-culottid days. The people will have high
festivals; they will offer incense to the Supreme Being, to the master
of nature; for we never intended to annihilate the reign of superstition
in order to set up the reign of atheism.... If we have not honoured the
priest of error and fanaticism, neither do we wish to honour the priest
of incredulity: we wish to serve the people. I demand that there shall
be an end of these anti-religious masquerades in the Convention.'

There was an end of the masquerading, but the Hebertists still kept
their ground. Danton, Robespierre, and the Committee were all equally
impotent against them for some months longer. The revolutionary force
had been too strong to be resisted by any government since the Paris
insurgents had carried both King and Assembly in triumph from Versailles
in the October of 1789. It was now too strong for those who had begun to
strive with all their might to build a new government out of the
agencies that had shattered the old to pieces. For some months the
battle which had been opened by Robespierre's remonstrance against
atheistic intolerance, degenerated into a series of masked skirmishes.
The battle-ground of rival principles was overshadowed by the baleful
wings of the genius of demonic Hate. _Vexilla regis prodeunt inferni_;
the banners of the King of the Pit came forth. The scene at the
Cordeliers for a time became as frantic as a Council of the Early Church
settling the true composition of the Holy Trinity. Or it recalls the
fierce and bloody contentions between Demos and Oligarchy in an old
Greek town. We think of the day in the harbour of Corcyra when the
Athenian admiral who had come to deliver the people, sailed out to meet
the Spartan enemy, and on turning round to see if his Corcyrean allies
were following, saw them following indeed, but the crew of every ship
striving in enraged conflict with one another. Collot D'Herbois had come
back in hot haste from Lyons, where, along with Fouche, he had done his
best to carry out the decree of the Convention, that not one stone of
the city should be left on the top of another, and that even its very
name should cease from the lips of men. Carrier was recalled from
Nantes, where his feats of ingenious massacre had rivalled the exploits
of the cruellest and maddest of the Roman Emperors. The presence of
these men of blood gave new courage and resolution to the Hebertists.
Though the alliance was informal, yet as against Danton, Camille
Desmoulins, and the rest of the Indulgents, as well as against
Robespierre, they made common cause.

Camille Desmoulins attacked Hebert in successive numbers of a journal
that is perhaps the one truly literary monument of this stage of the
revolution. Hebert retaliated by impugning the patriotism of Desmoulins
in the Club, and the unfortunate wit, notwithstanding the efforts of
Robespierre on his behalf, was for a while turned out of the sacred
precincts. The power of the extreme faction was shown in relation to
other prominent members of the party whom they loved to stigmatise by
the deadly names of Indulgent and Moderantist. Even Danton himself was
attacked (December 1793), and the integrity of his patriotism brought
into question. Robespierre made an energetic defence of his great rival
in the hierarchy of revolution, and the defence saved Danton from the
mortal ignominy of expulsion from the communion of the orthodox. On the
other hand, Anacharsis Clootz, that guileless ally of the party of
delirium, was less fortunate. Robespierre assailed the cosmopolitan for
being a German baron, for having four thousand pounds a year, and for
striking his sans-culottism some notes higher than the regular pitch.
Even M. Louis Blanc calls this an iniquity, and sets it down as the
worst page in Robespierre's life. Others have described Robespierre as
struck at this time by the dire malady of kings--hatred of the Idea. It
seems, however, a hard saying that devotion to the Idea is to extinguish
common sense. Clootz, notwithstanding his simple and disinterested
character, 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 their
silly gladness were suddenly caught up by that great wheel of fire. All
we can say is that Robespierre's bitter demeanour towards Clootz was
ungenerous; but then this is only natural in him. Robespierre often
clothed cool policy in the semblance of clemency, but I cannot hear in
any phrase he ever used, or see in any measure he ever proposed, the
mark of true generosity; of kingliness of spirit, not a trace. He had no
element of ready and cordial propitiation, an element that can never be
wanting in the greatest leaders in time of storm. If he resisted the
atrocious proposals to put Madame Elizabeth to death, he was thinking
not of mercy or justice, but of the mischievous effect that her
execution would have upon the public opinion of Europe, and he was so
unmanly as to speak of her as _la meprisable soeur de Louis XVI_. Such
a phrase is the disclosure of an abject stratum in his soul.

Yet this did not prevent him from seeing and denouncing the bloody
extravagances of the Proconsuls, the representatives of Parisian
authority in the provinces; nor from standing firm against the execution
of the Seventy-Three, who had been bold enough to question the purgation
of the National Convention on the Thirty-first of May. But the return of
Collot d'Herbois made the situation more intricate. Collot was by his
position the ally of Billaud, and to attack him, therefore, was to
attack the most powerful member of the Committee of Public Safety.
Billaud was too formidable. He was always the impersonation of the ruder
genius of the Revolution, and the incarnation of the philosophy of the
Terror, not as a delirium, but as a piece of deliberate policy. His
pale, sober, and concentrated physiognomy seemed a perpetual menace. He
had no gifts of speech, but his silence made people shudder, like the
silence of the thunder when the tempest rages at its height. It was said
by contemporaries that if Vadier was a hyaena, Barere a jackal, and
Robespierre a cat, Billaud was a tiger.

The cat perceived that he was in danger of not having the tiger, jackal,
and hyaena, on his side. Robespierre, in whom spasmodical courage and
timidity ruled by rapid turns, began to suspect that he had been
premature; and a convenient illness, which some suppose to have been
feigned, excused his withdrawal for some weeks from a scene where he
felt that he could no longer see clear. We cannot doubt that both he and
Danton were perfectly assured that the anarchic party must unavoidably
roll headlong into the abyss. But the hour of doom was uncertain. To
make a mistake in the right moment, to hurry the crisis, was instant
death. Robespierre was a more adroit calculator than Danton. We must not
confound his thin and querulous reserve with that stout and deep-browed
patience, which may imply as superb a fortitude, and may demand as much
iron control in a statesman, as the most heroic exploits of political
energy. But his habit of waiting on force, instead of, like the other,
taking the initiative with force, had trained his sight. The mixture of
astuteness with his scruple, of egoistic policy with his stiffness for
doctrine, gave him an advantage over Danton, that made his life worth
exactly three months' more purchase than Danton's. It has been said that
Spinozism or Transcendentalism in poetic production becomes
Machiavellism in reflection: for the same reasons we may always expect
sentimentalism in theory to become under the pressure of action a very
self-protecting guile. Robespierre's mind was not rich nor flexible
enough for true statesmanship, and it is a grave mistake to suppose that
the various cunning tacks in which his career abounds, were any sign of
genuine versatility or resource or political growth and expansion. They
were, in fact, the resort of a man whose nerves were weaker than his
volition. Robespierre was a kind of spinster. Force of head did not
match his spiritual ambition. He was not, we repeat, a coward in any
common sense; in that case he would have remained quiet among the
croaking frogs of the Marsh, and by and by have come to hold a portfolio
under the first Consul. He did not fear death, and he envied with
consuming envy those to whom nature had given the qualities of
initiative. But his nerves always played him false. The consciousness of
having to resolve to take a decided step alone, was the precursor of a
fit of trembling. His heart did not fail, but he could not control the
parched voice, nor the twitching features, not the ghastly palsy of
inner misgiving. In this respect Robespierre recalls a more illustrious
man; we think of Cicero tremblingly calling upon the Senate to decide
for him whether he should order the execution of the Catilinarian
conspirators. It is to be said, however, in his favour that he had the
art, which Cicero lacked, to hide his pusillanimity. Robespierre knew
himself, and did his best to keep his own secret.

His absence during the final crisis of the anarchic party allowed events
to ripen, without committing him to that initiative in dangerous action
which he had dreaded on the Tenth of August, as he dreaded it on every
other decisive day of this burning time. The party of the Commune
became more and more daring in their invectives against the Convention
and the Committees. At length they proclaimed open insurrection. But
Paris was cold, and opinion was divided. In the night of the Thirteenth
of March, Hebert, Chaumette, Clootz, were arrested. The next day
Robespierre recovered sufficiently to appear at the Jacobin Club. He
joined his colleagues of the Committee of Public Safety in striking the
blow. On the Twenty-fourth of March the Ultra-Revolutionist leaders were
beheaded.

The first bloody breach in the Jacobin ranks was speedily followed by
the second. The Right wing of the opposition to the Committee soon
followed the Left down the ways to dusty death, and the execution of the
Anarchists only preceded by a week the arrest of the Moderates. When the
seizure of Danton had once before been discussed in the Committee,
Robespierre resisted the proposal violently. We have already seen how he
defended Danton at the Jacobin Club, when the Club underwent the process
of purification in the winter. What produced this sudden tack? How came
Robespierre to assent in March to a violence which he had angrily
discountenanced in February? There had been no change in the policy or
attitude of Danton himself. The military operations against the domestic
and foreign enemies were no sooner fairly in the way of success, than
Danton began to meditate in serious earnest the consolidation of a
republican system of law and justice. He would fain have stayed the
Terror. 'Let us leave something,' he said, 'to the guillotine of
opinion.' He aided, no doubt, in the formation of the Revolutionary
Tribunal, but this was exactly in harmony with his usual policy of
controlling popular violence without alienating the strength of popular
sympathy. The process of the tribunal was rough and summary, but it was
fairer--until Robespierre's Law of Prairial--than people usually
suppose, and it was the very temple of the goddess of Justice herself
compared with the September massacres. 'Let us prove ourselves
terrible,' Danton said, 'to relieve the people from the necessity of
being so.' His activity had been incessant in urging and superintending
the great levies against the foreigner; he had gone repeatedly on
distant and harassing expeditions, as the representative of the
Convention at the camps on the frontier. In the midst of all this he
found time to press forward measures for the instruction of the young,
and for the due appointment of judges, and his head was full of ideas
for the construction of a permanent executive council. It was this which
made him eager for a cessation of the method of Terror, and it was this
which made the Committee of Public Safety his implacable enemy.

Why, then, did Robespierre, who also passed as a man of order and
humanity, not continue to support Danton after the suppression of the
Hebertists, as he had supported him before? The common and facile answer
is that he was moved by a malignant desire to put a rival out of the
way. On the whole, the evidence seems to support Napoleon's opinion that
Robespierre was incapable of voting for the death of anybody in the
world on grounds of personal enmity. And his acquiescence in the ruin of
Danton is intelligible enough on the grounds of selfish policy. The
Committee hated Danton for the good reason that he had openly attacked
them, and his cry for clemency was an inflammatory and dangerous protest
against their system. Now Robespierre, rightly or wrongly, had made up
his 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 famous
insurrectionary force of Paris, which Danton had been the first to
organise against a government, had just been chilled by the fall of the
Hebertists. Least of all could this force be relied upon to rise in
defence of the very chief whose every word for many weeks past had been
a protest against the Communal leaders. In separating himself from the
Ultras, Danton had cut off the great reservoir of his peculiar strength.

It may be said that the Convention was the proper centre of resistance
to the designs of the Committee, and that if Danton and Robespierre had
united their forces in the Convention they would have defeated Billaud
and his allies. This seems to us more than doubtful. The Committee had
acquired an immense preponderance over the Convention. They had been
eminently successful in the immense tasks imposed upon them. They had
the prestige not only of being the government--so great a thing in a
country that had just emerged from the condition of a centralised
monarchy; they had also the prestige of being a government that had done
its work triumphantly. We are now in March. In July we shall find that
Robespierre adopted the very policy that we are now discussing, of
playing off the Convention against the Committee. In July that policy
ended in his headlong fall. Why should it have been any more successful
four months earlier?

What we may say is, that Robespierre was bound in all morality to defend
Danton in the Convention at every hazard. Possibly so; but then to run
risks for chivalry's sake was not in Robespierre's nature, and no man
can climb out beyond the limitations of his own character. His narrow
head and thin blood and instable nerve, his calculating humour and his
frigid egoism, disinclined him to all games of chance. His apologists
have sought to put a more respectable colour on his abandonment of
Danton. The precisian, they say, disapproved of Danton's lax and
heedless courses. Danton said to him one day:--'What do I care? Public
opinion is a strumpet, and posterity a piece of nonsense.' How should
the puritanical lawyer endure such cynicism as this? And Danton
delighted in inflicting these coarse shocks. Again, Danton had given
various gross names of contempt to Saint Just. Was Robespierre not to
feel insults offered to the ablest and most devoted of his lieutenants?
What was more important than all, the acclamations with which the
partisans of reaction greeted the fall of the Ultras, made it necessary
to give instant and unmistakable notice to the foes of the Revolution
that the goddess of the scorching eye and fiery hand still grasped the
axe of her vengeance.

These are pleas invented after the fact. All goes to show that
Robespierre was really moved by nothing more than his invariable dread
of being left behind, of finding himself on the weaker side, of not
seeming practical and political enough. And having made up his mind that
the stronger party was bent on the destruction of the Dantonists, he
became fiercer than Billaud himself. It is constantly seen that the
waverer, of nervous atrabiliar constitution, no sooner overcomes the
agony of irresolution, than he flings himself on his object with a
vindictive tenacity that seems to repay him for all the moral
humiliation inflicted on him by his stifled doubts. He redeems the
slowness of his approach by the fury of his spring. 'Robespierre,' says
M. d'Hericault, 'precipitated himself to the front of the opinion that
was yelling against his friends of yesterday. In order to keep his usual
post in the van of the Revolution, in order to secure the advantage to
his own popularity of an execution which the public voice seemed to
demand, he came forward as the author of that execution, though only the
day before he had hesitated about its utility, and though it was, in
truth far less useful to him than it proved to be to his future
antagonists.'

Robespierre first alarmed Danton's friends by assuming a certain icy
coldness of manner, and by some menacing phrases about the faction of
the so-called Moderates. Danton had gone, as he often did, to his native
village of Arcis-sur-Aube, to seek repose and a little clearness of
sight in the night that wrapped him about. He was devoid of personal
ambition; he never had any humour for mere factious struggles. His,
again, was the temperament of violent force, and in such types the
reaction is always tremendous. The indomitable activity of the last
twenty months had bred weariness of spirit. The nemesis of a career of
strenuous Will in large natures is apt to be a sudden sense of the irony
of things. In Danton, as with Byron it happened afterwards, the
vehemence of the revolutionary spirit was touched by this desolating
irony. His friends tried to rouse him. It is not clear that he could
have done anything. The balance of force, after the suppression of the
Hebertists, was irretrievably against him, as calculation had already
revealed to Robespierre.

There are various stories of the pair having met at dinner almost on the
eve of Danton's arrest, and parting with sombre disquietude on both
sides. The interview, with its champagne, its interlocutors, its play of
sinister repartee, may possibly have taken place, but the alleged
details are plainly apocryphal. After all, 'Religion ist in der Thiere
Trieb,' says Wallenstein; 'the very savage drinks not with the victim,
into whose breast he means to plunge a sword.' Danton was warned that
Robespierre was plotting his arrest. 'If I thought he had the bare
idea,' said Danton with something of Gargantuan hyperbole, 'I would eat
his bowels out.' Such was the disdain with which the 'giant of the
mighty bone and bold emprise' thought of our meagre-hearted pedant. The
truth is that in the stormy and distracted times of politics, and
perhaps in all times, contempt is a dangerous luxury. A man may be a
very poor creature, and still have a faculty for mischief. And
Robespierre had this faculty in the case of Danton. With singular
baseness, he handed over to Saint Just a collection of notes, to serve
as material for the indictment which Saint Just was to present to the
Convention. They comprised everything that suspicion could interpret
malignantly, 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 proceedings
to obtain the assent of the Convention to the trial of Danton and others
of its members, one only of their friends had the courage to rise and
demand that they should be heard at the bar. Robespierre burst out in
cold rage; he asked whether they had undergone so many heroic
sacrifices, counting among them these acts of 'painful severity,' only
to fall under the yoke of a band of domineering intriguers; and he cried
out impatiently that they would brook no claim of privilege, and suffer
no rotten idol. The word was felicitously chosen, for the Convention
dreaded to have its independence suspected, and it dreaded this all the
more because at this time its independence did not really exist. The
vote against Danton was unanimous, and the fact that it was so is the
deepest stain on the fame of this assembly. On the afternoon of the
Sixteenth Germinal (April 5, 1794) Paris in amazement and some
stupefaction saw the once-dreaded Titan of the Mountain fast bound in
the tumbril, and faring towards the sharp-clanging knife. 'I leave it
all in a frightful welter,' Danton is reported to have said. 'Not a man
of them has an idea of government. Robespierre will follow me; he is
dragged down by me. Ah, better be a poor fisherman than meddle with the
governing of men!'

* * * * *

Let us pause for a moment over a calmer reminiscence. This was the very
day on which the virtuous and high-minded Condorcet quitted the friendly
roof that for nine months had concealed him from the search of
proscription. The same week he was found dead in his prison. While
Danton was storming with impotent thunder before the tribunal, Condorcet
was writing those closing words of his Sketch of Human Progress, which
are always so full of strength and edification. 'How this picture of the
human race freed from all its fetters,--withdrawn from the empire of
chance, as from that of the enemies of progress, and walking with firm
and assured step in the way of truth, of virtue, and happiness, presents
to 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 is
not seldom the victim! It is in the contemplation of this picture that
he receives the reward of his efforts for the progress of reason, for
the defence of liberty. He ventures to link them with the eternal chain
of the destinies of man: it is there he finds the true recompense of
virtue, the pleasure of having done a lasting good; fate can no longer
undo it, by any disastrous compensation that shall restore prejudice and
bondage. This contemplation is for him a refuge, into which the
recollection of his persecutors can never follow him; in which, living
in thought with man reinstated in the rights and the dignity of his
nature, 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 elysium
that his reason has known how to create for itself, and that his love
for humanity adorns with all purest delights.'

* * * * *

In following the turns of the drama which was to end in the tragedy of
Thermidor, we perceive that after the fall of the anarchists and the
death of Danton, the relations between Robespierre and the Committees
underwent 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 of
ultimate stability, but the difference between the new position and the
old is that he now distinctly associated the idea of a stable republic
with the ascendency of his own religious conceptions. How far the
ascendency of his own personality was involved, we have no means of
judging. The vulgar accusation against him is that he now deliberately
aimed at a dictatorship, and began to plot with that end in view. It is
always the most difficult thing in the world to draw a line between mere
arrogant egoism on the one hand, and on the other the identification of
a man's personal elevation with the success of his public cause. The two
ends 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 he
desires that his authority and renown shall receive some of the lustre
of a far-shining triumph. What we complain of in Napoleon Bonaparte, for
instance, is not that he sought power, but that he sought it in the
interests of a coarse, brutal, and essentially unmeaning personal
ambition. And so of Robespierre. We need not discuss the charge that he
sought to make himself master. The important thing is that his mastery
could have served no great end for France; that it would have been like
himself, poor, barren, and hopelessly mediocre. And this would have been
seen on every side. France had important military tasks to perform
before her independence was assured. Robespierre hated war, and was
jealous of every victory. France was in urgent need of stable
government, of new laws, of ordered institutions. Robespierre never said
a word to indicate that he had a single positive idea in his head on any
of these great departments. And, more than this, he was incapable of
making use of men who were more happily endowed than himself. He had
never mastered that excellent observation of De Retz, that of all the
qualities of a good party chief, none is so indispensable as being able
to suppress on many occasions, and to hide on all, even legitimate
suspicions. He was corroded by suspicion, and this paralyses able
servants. Finally, Robespierre had no imperial quality of soul, but only
that very sorry imitation of it, a lively irritability.

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