Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3)

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

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The base of Robespierre's schemes of social reconstruction now came
clearly into view; and what a base! An official Supreme Being, and a
regulated Terror. The one was to fill up the spiritual void, and the
other to satisfy all the exigencies of temporal things. It is to the
credit of Robespierre's perspicacity that he should have recognised the
human craving for religion, but this credit is as naught when we
contemplate the jejune thing that passed for religion in his dim and
narrow understanding. Rousseau had brought a new soul into the
eighteenth century by the Savoyard Vicar's Profession of Faith, the most
fervid and exalted expression of emotional deism that religious
literature contains; vague, irrational, incoherent, cloudy; but the
clouds are suffused with glowing gold. When we turn from that to the
political version of it in Robespierre's discourse on the relations of
religious and moral ideas with republican principles, we feel as one who
revisits a landscape that had been made glorious to him by a summer sky
and fresh liquid winds from the gates of the evening sun, only to find
it dead under a gray heaven and harsh blasts from the northeast.
Robespierre's words on the Supreme Being are never a brimming stream of
deep feeling; they are a literary concoction: never the self-forgetting
expansion of the religious soul, but only the composite of the
rhetorician. He thought he had a passion for religion; what he took for
religion was little more than mental decorum. We do not mean that he was
insincere, or that he was without a feeling for high things. But here,
as in all else, his aspiration was far beyond his faculty; he yearned
for great spiritual emotions, as he had yearned for great thoughts and
great achievements, but his spiritual capacity was as scanty and obscure
as his intelligence. And where unkind Nature thus unequally yokes lofty
objects in a man with a short mental reach, she stamps him with the very
definition of mediocrity.

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

The famous republican Calendar, with its Prairials and Germinals, its
Ventoses and Pluvioses, was an anachronism of the same kind, though it
was less despicable in its manifestation. Its philosophic base was just
as retrograde and out of season as the fooleries of the Feast of the
Supreme Being. The association of worship and sacredness with the fruits
of the earth, with the forces of nature, with the power and variety of
the elements, could only be sincere so long as men really thought of all
these things as animated each by a special will of its own. Such an
association became mere charlatanry, when knowledge once passed into the
positive stage. How could men go back to adore an outer world, after
they had found out the secret that it is a mere huge group of phenomena,
following fixed courses, and not obeying spontaneous and unaccountable
volitions of their own? And what could be more puerile than the fanciful
connection of the Supreme Being with a pastoral simplicity of life? This
simplicity was gone, irrecoverably gone, with the passage from nomad
times to the complexities of a modern society. To typify, therefore, the
Supreme Being as specially interested in shocks of grain and in
shepherds and shepherdesses was to make him a mere figure in an idyll,
the ornament of a rural mask, a god of the garden, instead of the
sovereign director of the universal forces, and stern master of the
destinies of men. Chaumette's commemoration of the Divinity of Reason
was a sensible performance, compared with Robespierre's farcical
repartee. It was something, as Comte has said, to select for worship
man's most individual attribute. If they could not contemplate society
as a whole, it was at least a gain to pay homage to that faculty in the
human rulers of the world, which had brought the forces of nature--its
pluviosity, nivosity, germinality, and vendemiarity--under the yoke for
the service of men.

If the philosophy of Robespierre's pageant was so retrograde and false,
its politics were still more inane. It is a monument of presumptuous
infatuation that any one should feel so strongly as he did that order
could only be restored on condition of coming to terms with religious
use and prejudice, and then that he should dream that his Supreme
Being--a mere didactic phrase, the deity of a poet's georgic--should
adequately replace that eternal marvel of construction, by means of
which the great churchmen had wrought dogma and liturgy and priest and
holy office into every hour and every mood of men's lives. There is no
binding principle of human association in a creed with this one bald
article. 'In truth,' as I have said elsewhere of such deism as
Robespierre's, 'one can scarcely call it a creed. It is mainly a name
for a particular mood of fine spiritual exaltation; the expression of a
state of indefinite aspiration and supreme feeling for lofty things. Are
you going to convert the new barbarians of our western world with this
fair word of emptiness? Will you sweeten the lives of suffering men, and
take its heaviness from that droning piteous chronicle of wrong and
cruelty and despair, which everlastingly saddens the compassionating ear
like moaning of a midnight sea; will you animate the stout of heart with
new fire, and the firm of hand with fresh joy of battle, by the thought
of a being without intelligible attributes, a mere abstract creation of
metaphysic, whose mercy is not as our mercy, nor his justice as our
justice, nor his fatherhood as the fatherhood of men? It was not by a
cold, a cheerless, a radically depraving conception such as this, that
the church became the refuge of humanity in the dark times of old, but
by the representation, to men sitting in bondage and confusion, of
godlike natures moving among them, under figure of the most eternally
touching of human relations,--a tender mother ever interceding for them,
and an elder brother laying down his life that their burdens might be
loosened.'

* * * * *

On the day of the Feast of the Supreme Being, the guillotine was
concealed in the folds of rich hangings. It was the Twentieth of
Prairial. Two days later Couthon proposed to the Convention the
memorable Law of the Twenty-second Prairial. Robespierre was the
draftsman, and the text of it still remains in his own writing. This
monstrous law is simply the complete abrogation of all law. Of all laws
ever passed in the world it is the most nakedly iniquitous. Tyrants have
often substituted their own will for the ordered procedure of a
tribunal, but no tyrant before ever went through the atrocious farce of
deliberately making a tribunal the organised negation of security for
justice. Couthon laid its theoretic base in a fallacy that must always
be full of seduction to shallow persons in authority: 'He who would
subordinate the public safety to the inventions of jurisconsults, to the
formulas of the Court, is either an imbecile or a scoundrel.' As if
public safety could mean anything but the safety of the public. The
author of the Law of Prairial had forgotten the minatory word of the
sage to whom he had gone on a pilgrimage in the days of his youth. 'All
becomes legitimate and even virtuous,' Helvetius had written, 'on behalf
of the public safety.' Rousseau inscribed on the margin, 'The public
safety is nothing, unless individuals enjoy security.' What security was
possible under the Law of Prairial?

After the probity and good judgment of the tribunal, the two cardinal
guarantees in state trials are accurate definition, and proof. The
offence must be capable of precise description, and the proof against
an offender must conform to strict rule. The Law of Prairial violently
infringed all three of these essential conditions of judicial equity.
First, the number of the jury who had power to convict was reduced.
Second, treason was made to consist in such vague and infinitely elastic
kinds of action as inspiring discouragement, misleading opinion,
depraving manners, corrupting patriots, abusing the principles of the
Revolution by perfidious applications. Third, proof was to lie in the
conscience of the jury; there was an end of preliminary inquiry, of
witnesses in defence, and of counsel for the accused. Any kind of
testimony was evidence, whether material or moral, verbal or written, if
it was of a kind 'likely to gain the assent of a man of reasonable
mind.'

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

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

What stamps the system of the Terror at this date with a wickedness
that cannot be effaced, is that at no moment was the danger from foreign
or domestic foe less serious. We may always forgive something to
well-grounded panic. The proscriptions of an earlier date in Paris were
not excessively sanguinary, if we remember that the city abounded in
royalists and other reactionists, who were really dangerous in fomenting
discouragement and spreading confusion. If there ever is an excuse for
martial law, and it must be rare, the French government were warranted
in resorting to it in 1793. Paris in those days was like a city
beleaguered, and the world does not use very harsh words about the
commandant of a besieged town who puts to death traitors found within
his walls. Opinion in England at this very epoch encouraged the Tory
government to pass a Treason Bill, which introduced as vague a
definition of treasonable offence as even the Law of Prairial itself.
Windham did not shrink from declaring in parliament that he and his
colleagues were determined to exact 'a rigour beyond the law.' And they
were as good as their word. The Jacobins had no monopoly either of cruel
law or cruel breach of law in the eighteenth century. Only thirty years
before, opinion in Pennsylvania had prompted a hideous massacre of
harmless Indians as a deed acceptable to God, and the grandson of
William Penn proclaimed a bounty of fifty dollars for the scalp of a
female Indian, and three times as much for a male. A man would have had
quite as good a chance of justice from the Revolutionary Tribunal, as
at the hands of Braxfield, the Scotch judge, who condemned Muir and
Palmer for sedition in 1793, and who told the government, with a brazen
front worthy of Carrier or Collot d'Herbois themselves, that, if they
would only send him prisoners, he would find law for them.

We have no sympathy with the spirit of paradox that has arisen in these
days, amusing itself by the vindication of bad men. We think that the
author of the Law of Prairial was a bad man. But it is time that there
should be an end of the cant which lifts up its hands at the crimes of
republicans and freethinkers, and shuts its eyes to the crimes of kings
and churches. Once more, we ought to rise into a higher air; we ought to
condemn, wherever we find it, whether on the side of our adversaries or
on our own, all readiness to substitute arbitrary force for the
processes of ordered justice. There are moments when such a readiness
may be leniently judged, but Prairial of 1794 was not one of them either
in France or in England. And what makes the crime of this law more
odious, is its association with the official proclamation of the State
worship of a Supreme Being. The scene of Robespierre's holy festival
becomes as abominable as a catholic Auto-da-fe, where solemn homage was
offered to the God of pity and loving-kindness, while flame glowed round
the limbs of the victims.

* * * * *

Robespierre was inflamed with resentment, not because so many people
were guillotined every day, but because the objects of his own enmity
were not among them. He was chagrined at the miscarriage of his scheme;
but the chagrin had its root in his desire for order, and not in his
humanity. A good man--say so imperfectly good a man as Danton--could not
have endured life, after enacting such a law, and seeing the ghastly
work that it was doing. He could hardly have contented himself with
drawing tears from the company in Madame Duplay's little parlour, by his
pathetic recitations from Corneille and Racine, or with listening to
melting notes from the violin of Le Bas. It is commonly said by
Robespierre's defenders that he withdrew from the Committee of Public
Safety, as soon as he found out that he was powerless to arrest the
daily shedding of blood. The older assumption used to be that he left
Paris, and ceased to be cognisant of the Committee's deliberations. The
minutes, however, prove that this was not the case. Robespierre signed
papers nearly every day of Messidor--(June 19 to July 18) the
blood-stained month between Prairial and Thermidor--and was thoroughly
aware of the doings of the Committee. His partisans have now fallen back
on the singular theory of what they style moral absence. He was present
in the flesh, but standing aloof in the spirit. His frowning silence was
a deadlier rebuke to the slayers and oppressors than secession.
Unfortunately for this ingenious explanation of the embarrassing fact of
a merciful man standing silent before merciless doings, there are at
least two facts that show its absurdity.

First, there is the affair of Catherine Theot. Catherine Theot was a
crazy old woman of a type that is commoner in protestant than in
catholic countries. She believed herself to have special gifts in the
interpretation of the holy writings, and a few other people as crazy as
herself chose to accept her pretensions. One revelation vouchsafed to
her was to the effect that Robespierre was a Messiah and the new
redeemer of the human race. The Committee of General Security resolved
to indict this absurd sect. Vadier,--one of the roughest of the men whom
the insurrections of Paris had brought to the front--reported on the
charges to the Convention (27 Prairial, June 15), and he took the
opportunity to make Robespierre look profoundly ridiculous. The
unfortunate Messiah sat on his bench, gnawing his lips with bitter rage,
while, amid the sneers and laughter of the Convention, the officers
brought to the bar the foolish creatures who had called him the Son of
God. His thin pride and prudish self-respect were unutterably affronted,
and he quite understood that the ridicule of the mysticism of Theot was
an indirect pleasantry upon his own Supreme Being. He flew to the
Committee of Public Safety, angrily reproached them for permitting the
prosecution, summoned Fouquier-Tinville, and peremptorily ordered him to
let the matter drop. In vain did the public prosecutor point out that
there was a decree of the Convention ordering him to proceed.
Robespierre was inexorable. The Committee of General Security were
baffled, and the prosecution ended. 'Lutteur impuissant et fatigue,'
says M. Hamel, the most thoroughgoing defender of Robespierre, upon
this, 'il va se retirer, moralement du moins.' Impotent and wearied! But
he had just won a most signal victory for good sense and humanity. Why
was it the only one? If Robespierre was able to save Theot, why could he
not save Cecile Renault?

Cecile Renault was a young seamstress who was found one evening at the
door of Robespierre's lodging, calling out in a state of exaltation that
she would fain see what a tyrant looked like. She was arrested, and upon
her were found two little knives used for the purposes of her trade.
That she should be arrested and imprisoned was natural enough. The times
were charged with deadly fire. People had not forgotten that Marat had
been murdered in his own house. Only a few days before Cecile Renault's
visit to Robespierre, an assassin had fired a pistol at Collot d'Herbois
on the staircase of his apartment. We may make allowance for the
excitement of the hour, and Robespierre had as much right to play the
martyr, as had Lewis the Fifteenth after the incident of Damiens' rusty
pen-knife. But the histrionic exigencies of the chief of a faction ought
not to be pushed too far. And it was a monstrous crime that because
Robespierre found it convenient to pose as sacrificial victim at the
Club, therefore he should have had no scruple in seeing not only the
wretched Cecile, but her father, her aunt, and one of her brothers, all
despatched to the guillotine in the red shirt of parricide, as agents of
Pitt and Coburg, and assassins of the father of the land. This was
exactly two days after he had shown his decisive power in the affair of
the religious illuminists. The only possible conclusion open to a plain
man after weighing and putting aside all the sophisms with which this
affair has been obscured, is that Robespierre interfered in the one case
because its further prosecution would have tended to make him
ridiculous, and he did not interfere in the other, because the more
exaggerated, the more melodramatic, the more murderous it was made, the
more interesting an object would he seem in the eyes of his adorers.

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

From these two circumstances, then, even if there were no other, we are
justified in inferring that Robespierre was struck by no remorse at the
thought that it was his law which had unbound the hands of the horrible
genie of civil murder. His mind was wholly absorbed in the calculations
of a frigid egoism. His intelligence, as we have always to remember, was
very dim. He only aimed at one thing at once, and that was seldom
anything very great or far-reaching. He was a man of peering and
obscured vision in face of practical affairs. In passing the Law of
Prairial, his designs--and they were meritorious and creditable designs
enough in themselves--had been directed against the corrupt chiefs, such
as Tallien and Fouche, and against the fierce and coarse spirits of the
Committee of General Security, such as Vadier and Voulland. Robespierre
was above all things a precisian. He had a sentimental sympathy with the
common people in the abstract, but his spiritual pride, his pedantry,
his formalism, his personal fastidiousness, were all wounded to the very
quick by the kind of men whom the Revolution had thrown to the surface.
Gouverneur Morris, then the American minister, describes most of the
members of the two Committees as the very dregs of humanity, with whom
it is a stain to have any dealings; as degraded men only worthy of the
profoundest contempt. Danton had said: 'Robespierre is the least of a
scoundrel of any of the band.' The Committee of General Security
represented the very elements by which Robespierre was most revolted.
They offended his respectability; their evil manners seemed to tarnish
that good name which his vanity hoped to make as revered all over
Europe, as it already was among his partisans in France. It was
indispensable therefore to cut them off from the revolutionary
government, just as Hebert and as Danton had been cut off. His
colleagues of Public Safety refused to lend themselves to this.
Henceforth, with characteristically narrow tenacity, he looked round for
new combinations, but, so far as I can see, with no broader design than
to enable him to punish these particular objects of his very just
detestation.

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