The cut-throats can at last take some repose. They have worked all the week. There are still some, however, who have not yet had enough, and who are going to continue the massacres of Paris in the provinces. The Communal Council of Surveillance has taken care to send to every commune in France a circular bearing the seal of the Minister of Justice, inviting them to follow the example of the capital.
September 9, the prisoners who had been detained at Orleans to be tried there by the Superior Court, entered Versailles on carts. At the moment when they approached the grating of the Orangery, assassins sent from Paris under the lead of Fournier "the American" sprang upon them and immolated every one. Thus perished the former Minister of Foreign Affairs, de Lessart, and the Duke de Brissac, former commander of the Constitutional Guard. Fournier "the American"[2] returned on horseback to Paris and began to caracole on the Place Vendôme; Danton loudly felicitated him on the success of the expedition, from the balcony of the Ministry of Justice.
During all this time, what efforts had the Assembly made to put a stop to the murders? None, absolutely none. Never has any deliberative body shown a like cowardice. Neither Vergniaud's voice nor that of any other Girondin was heard in protest. Indignation, pity, found not a single word to say. Speeches,discussions, votes on different questions, went on as usual. Concerning the massacres, not a syllable. During that infamous week, neither the ministers, the virtuous Roland not more than the others, neither Pétion, the mayor of Paris, nor the commander of the National Guard sent a picket guard of fifty men to any quarter to prevent the murders. A population of eight hundred thousand souls and a National Guard of fifty thousand men bent their necks under the yoke of a handful of bandits, of two hundred and thirty-five assassins (the exact number is known). People trembled. At the Assembly the old moderate party had disappeared. There were not more than two hundred odd deputies present at the shameful and powerless sessions. Terrorized Paris was in a state of stupor and prostration.
The murderers ended by execrating themselves. Tormented by remorse, they could see nothing before them but vivid faces, reeking entrails, bleeding limbs. "Among the cut-throats," M. Louis Blanc has said, "some gave signs of insanity that led to the supposition that some mysterious and terrible drug had been mingled with the wine they drank." Some of them became furious madmen. Others sought refuge in suicide, killing themselves the moment they had no one else to kill. Others enlisted. They were chased out of the army. Among these was the man who had carried the head of the Princess de Lamballe on a pike. One day when he was boasting of his murders, the soldiers became indignant andput him to death. Others still were tried as Septembrists and sent to the scaffold. The guilty received their punishment, even on this earth. Well! there are people nowadays who would like to rehabilitate them! In vain has Lamartine, the founder of the Second Republic, exclaimed in a burst of noble wrath: "Has human speech an execration, an anathema, which is equal to the horror these crimes of cannibals inspire in me, as in all civilized men?" In vain have the most celebrated historians of democracy, Edgar Quinet and Michelet, expressed in eloquent terms their indignation against these crimes. In vain has M. Louis Blanc said: "Every murder is a suicide. In the victim the body alone is killed; but what is killed in the murderer is the soul." There are men who would not alone excuse, but glorify the assassinations and the assassins!
[1] M. Mortimer-Ternaux,Histoire de la Terreur.
[2] Claude Fournier-Lhéritier, was born in Auvergne, 1745, and served as a volunteer in Santo Domingo, 1772-85, with Toussaint l'Ouverture, whence his sobriquet "the American."
Madame Roland's hatred was appeased. The ambitiousbourgeoisethroned it for the second time at the Ministry of the Interior, and the Queen groaned in captivity in the Temple tower. The Egeria of the Girondins had not felt her heart swell with a single movement of pity for Marie Antoinette. The fatal 10th of August had seemed to her a personal triumph in which her pride delighted. The parvenue enjoyed the humiliations of the daughter of the German Cæsars. Her jealous instincts feasted on the afflictions of the Queen of France and Navarre.
Lamartine, indignant at this cruelty on Madame Roland's part, has repented of the eulogies he gave her in hisHistoire des Girondins. In hisCours de Littérature(Volume XIII. Conversation XXIII.), he says: "I glided over that medley of intrigue and pomposity which composed the genius, both feminine and Roman, of this woman. In so doing, I conceded more to popularity than to truth. I wanted to give a Cornelia to the Republic. As a matter of fact, I do not know what Cornelia was, that mother of theGracchi who brought up conspirators against the Roman Senate, and trained them to sedition, that virtue of ambitious commoners. As to Madame Roland, who inflated a vulgar husband by the breath of her feminine anger against a court she found odious because it did not open to her upstart vanity, there was nothing really fine in her except her death. Her rôle had been a mere parade of true greatness of soul." What Lamartine finds fault with most of all is her hostility to the martyr Queen. He adds: "She inspired the Girondins, her intimate friends, with an implacable hatred against the Queen, already so humiliated and so menaced; she had neither respect nor pity for this victim; she points her out to the rebellious multitude. She is no longer a wife, a mother, or a Frenchwoman. She poses as Nemesis at the door of the Temple, when the Queen is groaning there over her husband, her children, and herself, between the throne and the scaffold. This ostentatious stoicism of implacability is what, in my view, kills the woman in this female demagogue."
Alas! if Madame Roland was guilty, she was to be punished cruelly. The colleague of thevirtuousRoland was the organizer of the September massacres. The republican sheepfold dreamed of by the admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau was invaded by ferocious beasts. Human nature had never appeared under a more execrable aspect than since its so-called regeneration. Madame Roland was filled with a naïve astonishment. After having sown the wind she wasutterly surprised to reap the whirlwind. What! she said to herself, my husband is minister, or, to speak with great exactness, I am the minister myself, and yet there are people in France who are dissatisfied! Ungrateful nation, why dost thou not appreciate thy happiness? Madame Roland resembled certain politicians, who, having attained to power, would willingly disembarrass themselves of those by whose aid they reached it. For the second time she had just arrived at the goal of her ambition. Who dared, then, to pollute her joy? Why did that marplot, Danton, come with his untimely massacres to destroy such brilliant projects and banish such delightful dreams? The man who, as if in derision and antithesis, allowed himself to be called the Minister of Justice, produced the effect of a monster on Madame Roland. The republic as conceived by him had not the head of a goddess, but of a Gorgon. Its eyes glittered with a sinister lustre. The sword it held was that of an assassin or a headsman.
Madame Roland was greatly astonished when, on Sunday, September 2, 1792, toward five in the evening, when the massacres had already begun, she saw two hundred men of forbidding appearance arrive at the Ministry of the Interior and ask for her husband, who was absent. Lucky for him he was; for albeit a minister, they had come to arrest him in virtue of a mandate of the Communal Council of Surveillance. Not finding Roland, the two hundred men retired. One of them, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up to hiselbows, and a sabre in his hand, declaimed furiously against the treachery of ministers. A few minutes later, Danton said to Pétion: "Do you know what they have taken into their heads? If they haven't issued a decree to arrest Roland!"—"Who did that?" demanded the mayor.—"Eh! those devils of committeemen. I have taken the mandate; hold! here it is!"
What was Madame Roland doing the next day, when the worst of the massacres were going on? She gave a dinner, and allowed the Prussian, Anacharsis Clootz, who came, moreover, uninvited, to make a regular defence of these horrible murders. "The events of the day," she says in her Memoirs, "formed the subject of conversation. Clootz pretended to prove that it was an indispensable and salutary measure; he uttered a good many commonplaces about the people's rights, the justice of their vengeance, and of its utility to the welfare of the species; he talked a long while and very loudly, ate still more, and fatigued more than one listener."
And yet, revolutionary passions had not extinguished every notion of humanity and justice in Madame Roland's soul. On that very day she induced her husband to write a letter to the National Assembly concerning the massacres. But how weak and undecided is this letter, and how public opinion must have been lowered and debased when it could regard Roland as a courageous minister! In place of scathing the murderers with the energy of anhonest man, he pleads extenuating circumstances in their favor. "It is in the nature of things and according to the human heart," he said in his pale missive, "that victory should lead to some excesses. The sea, agitated by a violent storm, continues to roar long after the tempest; but everything has its limits and must finally see them determined. Yesterday was a day over whose events we ought, perhaps, to draw a veil. I know that the terrible vengeance of the people carries with it a sort of justice; but how easy it is for scoundrels and traitors to abuse this effervescence, and how necessary it is to arrest it!" This language produced not the least effect. The massacres went on, and Roland remained minister; although in his letter of September 3 he had written: "I ask the privilege of resigning if the silence of the laws does not permit me to act." ThevirtuousRoland sat in the Council beside his colleague, the organizer of this human butchery. September 13, he addressed a letter to the Parisians in which he burnt incense to himself, bragged about his character, his actions, and his firmness, and carried his infatuation so far as to write: "I have twice accepted a burden which I felt myself able to bear." Ah! how difficult it is to renounce even a shadow of power, and of what compromises with their consciences are not ministers capable in order to retain for a few days longer the portfolios that are slipping from their hands! In the depths of his soul Roland, like his wife, had the profoundest horror of the murders andthe murderers. And yet notice how he extenuates them in his letter to the Parisians: "I admired August 10; I trembled over the results of September 2; I carefully considered what the betrayed patience of the people and their justice had produced, and I did not blame a first impulse too inconsiderately; I believe that its further progress should have been prevented, and that those who were seeking to perpetuate it were deceived by their imagination or by cruel and evil-minded men. If the erring brethren recognize that they have been deceived, let them come; my arms are open to them." That was a very prompt amnesty. Already the assassins are but erring brethren, and the minister welcomes them to his arms!
The Gironde kept silence, or, if it spoke, it was to attribute, like Vergniaud, the massacres "to theémigrésand the satellites of Coblentz." Later on, they were horrified by the crimes, but it was when others were to profit by them. Each taken by himself, the Girondins did not hesitate to condemn the murders; but taken as a whole, they considered merely the interests of their party. Were not three of them still in the Ministerial Council? What had they to complain of, then? The September massacres are the most striking expression of what abominations the ambitious may commit or allow to be committed in order to maintain themselves a few weeks longer in power.
But there is a voice in the depths of consciencewhich neither interest nor ambition can succeed in stifling. Madame Roland could not blind herself. The odious reality appeared to her. At last she saw the yawning gulf beneath her feet, and she uttered a cry of terror. A secret voice warned her that her fate would be like that of the September victims. After the 9th of that fatal month her imagination was vividly impressed. Bloody phantoms rose before her. She wrote on that day to Bancal des Issarts: "If you knew the frightful details of these expeditions.... You know my enthusiasm for the Revolution; well, I am ashamed of it; it has become hideous. In a week ... how do I know what may happen? It is degrading to remain in office, and we are not permitted to leave Paris. We are detained so that we may be destroyed at the propitious moment."
From that time a rising anger and indignation took possession of the mind and heart of the Egeria of the Girondins, and constantly increased until the hour when she ascended the steps of the scaffold. She writes in her Memoirs, apropos of the September massacres: "All Paris witnessed these horrible scenes executed by a small number of wretches (there were but fifteen at the Abbey, at the door of which only two National Guards were stationed, in spite of the applications made to the Commune and the commandant). All Paris permitted it to go on. All Paris was accursed in my eyes, and I no longer hoped that liberty might be established among cowards, insensible to the worst outrages that could be perpetratedagainst nature and humanity, cold spectators of attempts which the courage of fifty armed men could have prevented with ease.... It is not the first night that astonishes me; but four days!—and inquisitive people going to see this spectacle! No, I know nothing in the annals of the most barbarous peoples which can compare with these atrocities."
What a striking lesson for those who play with anarchical passions and end by falling themselves into the snares they have laid for others! Nothing is more deserving of study than this retaliatory punishment which is found, one may say, on every page of revolutionary histories. The hour was coming when the Girondins and their heroine would repent of the means they had employed to overset the throne. This was when the same means were employed against them, when they recognized their own weapons in the wounds they received. Then, when they had no more interest in keeping silence, they sought to escape a complicity that gained them nothing. Instead of the luminous heights which in their golden dreams they had aspired to gain, they fell, crushed and overwhelmed, into a dismal gulf, full of tears and blood. How bitter then were their recriminations against men and things! It was only to virtue that the dying Brutus said: "Thou art but a name." The Girondins said it also to glory, to country, and to liberty. Those among them who did not succeed in fleeing, disavowed, denounced, and insulted each other before the revolutionary tribunal. At theConciergerie they intoned the Marseillaise, but parodying the demagogic chant in this wise:—
Contre nous de la tyrannie[1]Lecouteausanglant est levé.
Read the Memoirs of Louvet, Buzot, Barbaroux, Pétion, and Madame Roland, and you will see to what extremes of bitterness the language of deceived ambition can go. They are paroxysms of rage, howls of anger, shrieks of despair. Consider the difference between philosophy and religion! The philosophers curse, and the Christian pardons. Yes, as Edgar Quinet has said, "Louis XVI. alone speaks of forgiveness on that scaffold to which the others were to bring thoughts of vengeance and despair. And by that he seems still to reign over those who were to follow him in death with the passions and the furies of earth." Louis XVI. will be magnanimous and calm. A celestial sweetness will overspread his royal countenance. An infernal rage will distort the heart and the features of the Girondins. What pains, what tortures, in their death-struggle! Earth fails them, and they do not look to heaven. What accents of disgust and hatred when they speak of their former accomplices, now become their executioners!
"Great God!" Buzot will say, "if it is only by such men and such infamous means that republicscan arise and be consolidated, there is no government more frightful on this earth nor more fatal to human happiness." He will address these insults, worthy of the imprecations of Camillus, to the city of Paris: "I say truly, that France can expect neither liberty nor happiness except from the irreparable destruction of that capital."
Barbaroux will be still more severe. His anathemas are launched not only at Paris, but at all France. "The people," he says, "do not deserve that one should become attached to them, for they are essentially ungrateful. It is the absurdest folly to try to conduct to liberty people without morals, who blaspheme God and adore Marat. These people are no more fit for a philosophic government than the lazzaroni of Naples or the cannibals of America.... Liberty, virtue, sacred rights of men, to-day you are nothing but empty names." Pétion, before dying, will write to his son this letter, which is like the testament of the Gironde: "My greatest torment will be to think that so many crimes went unpunished; vengeance is here the most sacred of duties.... My son, either the murderers of thy father and thy country will be delivered to the severities of the law and expiate their crimes upon the scaffold, or thou art under obligation to free thy country from them. They have broken all the ties of society; their crimes are of such a nature that they do not fall under ordinary rules. From such monsters every one is authorized to purge the earth."
Madame Roland will be not less vehement than Buzot, Barbaroux, and Pétion. She will address these severe but just reproaches to her friends who had not been valiant enough in their own defence: "They temporized with crime, the cowards! They were to fall in their turn, but they succumb shamefully, pitied by nobody, and with nothing to expect from posterity but utter contempt.... Rather than obey their tyrants, than descend from the bar and go out of the Assembly like a timid flock about to be branded by the butcher, why did they not do justice to themselves by falling on the monsters to annihilate them rather than be sentenced by them?" It is not her friends alone whom her anger will lash, but the sovereign people, the people once so flattered, whom she will pursue with her anathemas. "The people," she will say, "can feel nothing but the cannibal joy of seeing blood flow, in order that they may run no risk of shedding their own. That predicted time has come when, if they ask for bread, dead bodies will be given them; but their degraded nature takes pleasure in the spectacle, and the satisfied instinct of cruelty makes the dearth supportable until it becomes absolute." The Egeria of the Girondins will comprehend that all is lost, that even her blood will be sterile, and that France is condemned either to anarchy or a dictatorship. "Liberty," she will exclaim, "was not made for this corrupt nation, which leaves the bed of debauchery or the dunghill of poverty only to brutalize itself in license, and howl as itwallows in the blood streaming from scaffolds." Like the damned souls in Dante, Madame Roland will leave all hope behind, and when, a few days after Marie Antoinette, she ascends the steps of the guillotine, instead of thinking of heaven, like the Queen, she will address this sarcastic speech to the plaster statue which has replaced that of Louis XV.: "O Liberty! how they have betrayed thee!"
But let us not anticipate. The Girondins are still to have a glimmer of joy. The Republic is about to be proclaimed.
[1] The bloodyknifeof tyranny is lifted against us.
"One of the astonishing things in the French Revolution," says one of the most eminent writers of the democratic school, Edgar Quinet, "is the unexpectedness with which the great changes occur. The most important events, the destruction of the monarchy and the advent of the Republic, came about without any previous warning." The most ardent republicans were royalists, not merely under the old régime, but after 1789, and even up to August 10, 1792. Marat wrote, in No. 374 of theAmi du Peuple, February 17, 1791: "I have often been represented as a mortal enemy of royalty, but I claim that the King has no better friend than myself." And he added: "As to Louis XVI. personally, I know very well that his defects are chargeable solely to his education, and that by nature he is an excellent sort of man, whom one would have cited as a worthy citizen if he had not had the misfortune to be born on the throne; but, such as he is, he is at all events the King we want. We ought to thank Heaven for having given him to us. We ought to pray that he may be spared to us." Marat praying,Marat thanking Heaven! and for whom? For the King. Does not that prove what deep root royalty had taken in France? April 20, 1792, the same Marat bitterly reproached Condorcet with "shamelessly calumniating the Jacobin Club, and perfidiously accusing it of wishing to destroy the monarchy" (L' Ami du Peuple, No. 434). June 13, he attacked those who violated the oath taken at the time of the Federation, and said: "To defend the Constitution is the same thing as to be faithful to the nation, the law, and the King" (L' Ami du Peuple, No. 448).
During the entire continuance of the Legislative Assembly, when Robespierre, having left the tribune, was pretending to educate the people by means of his journal, what he defended to the utmost was the royal Constitution. Madame Roland relates that after the flight to Varennes, when the prospect of a republic loomed up, possibly for the first time, at a secret meeting, Robespierre, grinning as usual, and biting his nails, asked ironically what a republic might be. In June, 1792, the entire Jacobin Club was royalist still. It proposed to drop Billaud-Varennes, because Billaud-Varennes had dared to put the monarchical principle in question. On the 7th of July following, two months and a half, that is, before the opening of the Convention, at the time of the famous Lamourette Kiss, all the members of the Assembly swore to execrate the Republic forever. Three weeks after September 2, Danton alleged the paucity and the weakness of the republicans, compared with the royalists, asmotives for the massacres. Pétion has said: "When the insurrection of August 10 was undertaken, there were but five men in France who desired a republic."
Buzot, Madame Roland's idol, has written: "A wretched mob, unintelligent and unenlightened, vomited forth insults against royalty; the rest neither desired nor willed anything but the Constitution of 1791, and spoke of the republicans just as one speaks of extremely honest fools. This people is republican only through force of the guillotine." And yet, September 21, 1792, the Convention, holding its first sitting in the Hall of the Manège, began by proclaiming the Republic.
Buzot, in his Memoirs, has thus described the deputations that were sent to the bar, and the public that occupied the galleries: "It seemed as if the outlet of every sewer in Paris and other great cities had been searched for whatever was most filthy, hideous, and infected. Villainously dirty faces, surmounted by shocks of greasy hair, and with eyes half sunk into their heads, they spat out, with their nauseating breath, the grossest insults mingled with the sharp snarls of carnivorous beasts. The galleries were worthy of such legislators: men whose frightful aspect betokened crime and poverty, and women whose shameless faces expressed the filthiest debauchery. When all these with hands and feet and voice made their horrible racket, one seemed to be in an assembly of devils."
When the session opened, Collot d'Herbois wasthe first speaker. He said: "There is a matter which you cannot put off until to-morrow, which you cannot put off until this evening, which you cannot defer for a single instant without being unfaithful to the wishes of the nation; it is the abolition of royalty." Quinet having objected that it would be better to present this question when the Constitution was to be discussed, Grégoire, constitutional Bishop of Blois, exclaimed: "Certainly, no one will ever propose to us to preserve the deadly race of kings in France. All the dynasties have been breeds of ravenous beasts, living on nothing but human flesh; still it is necessary to reassure plainly the friends of liberty; this magic talisman, which still has power to stupefy so many men, must be destroyed." Bazire remarked that it would be a frightful example to the people to see an Assembly which they had entrusted with their dearest interests, resolve upon anything in a moment of enthusiasm and without thorough discussion. Grégoire replied with vehemence: "Eh! what need is there of discussion when everybody is of the same mind? Kings, in the moral order, are what monsters are in the physical order. Courts are the workshop of crime and the lair of tyrants. The history of kings is the martyrology of nations; we are all equally penetrated by this truth. What is the use of discussing it?" Then the question, put to vote in these terms: "The National Convention declares that royalty is abolished in France," was adopted amidst applause.
At four in the afternoon of the same day, a municipal officer named Lubin, surrounded by mounted gendarmes and a large crowd of people, came to read a proclamation before the Temple tower. The trumpets were sounded. A great silence ensued, and Lubin, who had a stentorian voice, read loud enough to be heard by the royal family confined in the dungeon, this proclamation, the death knell of monarchy: "Royalty is abolished in France. All public acts will be dated from the first year of the Republic. The seal of State will be inscribed with this motto:Republique française. The National Seal will represent a woman seated on a sheaf of arms, holding in one hand a pike surmounted by a liberty-cap." Hébert (the famous Père Duchesne) was at this moment on guard near the royal family. Sitting on the threshold of their chamber, he sought to discover a movement of vexation or anger, or any other emotion on their faces. He was unsuccessful. While listening to the revolutionary decree which snatched away his throne, the descendant of Saint Louis, Henry IV., and Louis XIV. experienced not the slightest trouble. He had a book in his hand, and he quietly went on reading it. As impassive as her spouse, the Queen neither made a movement nor uttered a word. When the proclamation was finished, the trumpets sounded again. Cléry then went to the window, and the eyes of the crowd turned instantly towards him. As they mistook him for Louis XVI., they overwhelmed him with insults. The gendarmes made threateninggestures, and he was obliged to withdraw so as to quiet the tumult. While the populace was unchained around the Temple prison, one man alone was calm, one man alone seemed a stranger to all anxiety: it was the prisoner.
A new era begins. The death-struggle of royalty is over. Royalty is dead, and the King is soon to die. Grégoire, who had stolen the vote (there were but 371 conventionists present; 374 were absent; that is to say, more than half), is both surprised and enthusiastic about what he has done. He confesses that for several days his excessive joy deprived him of appetite and sleep. Such joy will not last very long. M. Taine compares revolutionary France to a badly nourished workman, poor, and overdriven with toil, and yet who drinks strong liquors. At first, in his intoxication, he thinks he is a millionnaire, loved and admired; he thinks himself a king. "But soon the radiant visions give place to black and monstrous phantoms.... At present, France has passed through the period of joyous delirium, and is about to enter on another that is sombre; behold it, capable of daring, suffering, and doing all things, whenever its guides, as widely astray as itself, shall point out an enemy or an obstacle to its fury."
How quickly the disenchantments come! Already Lafayette, the man of generous illusions, has had to imitate the conduct of thoseémigréson whom he has been so severe. He has fled to a foreign land, and found there not a refuge, but a prison. He willremain more than five years in the gloomy fortress of Olmutz. The victor of Valmy, Dumouriez, will hardly be more fortunate. He will go over to the enemy, and live in exile on a pension from foreign powers. How close together deceptions and recantations come! Marat, who had already said to the inhabitants of the capital: "Eternal cockneys, with what epithets would I not assail you in the transports of my despair, if I knew any more humiliating than that of Parisians?"[1] Marat, who had said to all Frenchmen: "No, no; liberty is not made for an ignorant, light, and frivolous nation, for cits brought up in fear, dissimulation, knavery, and lying, nourished in cunning, intrigue, sycophancy, avarice, and swindling, subsisting only by theft and rapine, aspiring after nothing but pleasures, titles, and decorations, and always ready to sell themselves for gold!"[2] Marat will write, May 7th, 1793, that is to say, at the apogee of his favorite political system: "All measures taken up to the present day by the assemblies, constituent, legislative, and conventional, to establish and consolidate liberty, have been thoughtless, vain, and illusory, even supposing them to have been taken in good faith. The greater part seem to have had for their object to perpetuate oppression, bring on anarchy, death, poverty, and famine; to make the people weary of their independence, to make liberty a burden, to cause them todetest the Revolution, through its excessive disorders, to exhaust them by watching, fatigue, want, and inanition, to reduce them to despair by hunger, and to bring them back to despotism by civil war."[3]
There were six ministers appointed on August 10. Two of them, Claviére and Roland, will kill themselves; two others, Lebrun-Tondu and Danton, will be guillotined; the remaining two, Servan and Monge, are destined to become, one a general of division under Napoleon, and the other a senator of the Empire and Count of Péluse; and when, at the beginning of his reign, the Emperor complains to the latter because there are still partisans of the Republic to be found: "Sire," the former minister of August 10 will answer, "we had so much trouble to make them republicans! may it please Your Majesty kindly to allow them at least a few days to become imperialists!" Of the two men who had so enthusiastically brought about the proclamation of the Republic, one, Collot d'Herbois, will be transported to Guiana by the republicans, and die there in a paroxysm of burning fever; the other, Grégoire, will be a senator of the Empire, which will not, however, prevent him from promoting the deposition of Napoleon as he had promoted that of Louis XVI. There are men who will exchange the jacket of thesans-culottefor the gilded livery of an imperial functionary. The conventionists and regicides aretransformed into dukes and counts and barons. David, the official painter of the Empire, Napoleon's favorite, will paint with joy the picture of a pope, and be very proud of his great picture of the new Charlemagne's coronation. But listen to Edgar Quinet: "When I see the orators of deputations taking things with such a high hand at the bar, and lording it so proudly over mute and complaisant assemblies, I should like to know what became of them a few years later." And thereupon he sets out to discover their traces. But after considerable investigation he stops. "If I searched any further," he exclaims, "I should be afraid of encountering them among the petty employés of the Empire. It was quite enough to see Huguenin, the indomitable president of the insurrectionary Commune, so quickly tamed, soliciting and obtaining a post as clerk of town gates as soon as absolute power made its reappearance after the 18th Brumaire. The terrible Santerre becomes the gentlest of men as soon as he is pensioned by the First Consul. Hardly had Bourdon de l'Oise and Albitte, those men of iron, felt the rod than you see them the supplest functionaries of the Empire. The great king-taker, Drouet, thrones it in the sub-prefecture of Sainte-Menehould. Napoleon has related that, on August 10, he was in a shop in the Carrousel, whence he witnessed the taking of the palace. If he had a presentiment then, he must have smiled at the chaos which he was to reduce so easily to its former limits. How many furies, and all to terminate so soon in the accustomed obedience!"
Is not history, with its perpetual alternatives of license and despotism, like a vicious circle? And do not the nations pass their time in producing webs of Penelope, whose bloody threads they weave and unweave again with tears? All governments, royalties, empires, republics, ought to be more modest. But all, profoundly forgetful of the lessons of the past, believe themselves immortal. All declare haughtily that they have closed forever the era of revolutions.
With the advent of the Republic a new calendar had been put in force. The equality of days and nights at the autumnal equinox opened the era of civil equality on September 22. "Who would have believed that this human geometry, so profoundly calculated, was written in the sand, and that in a few years no traces of it would remain? ... The heavens have continued to gravitate, and have brought back the equality of days and nights; but they have allowed the promised liberty and equality to perish, like meteors that vanish in empty space.... Thesans-culotteshave not been able to make themselves popular among the starry peoples.... An ancient belief which the men of the Revolution had neglected through fear or through contempt was again met with; a spectre had appeared; a chilly breath, like that of Samuel, had made itself felt; and lo, the edifice so sagely constructed, and leaning on the worlds, has vanished away."[4]
There lies at the foundation of history a supreme sadness and melancholy. This never-ending series of illusions and deceptions, errors and afflictions, faults and crimes; this rage, and passion, and folly; so many efforts and fatigues, so many dangers, tortures, and tears, so much blood, such revolutions, catastrophies, cataclysms of every sort,—and all for what? Wretched humanity, rolling its stone of Sisyphus from age to age, inspires far more compassion than contempt. The painful reflections caused by the annals of all peoples are perhaps more sombre for the French Revolution than for any other period. Edgar Quinet justly laments over the inequality between the sacrifices of the victims and the results obtained by posterity. He affirms that in other histories one thing reconciles us to the fury of men, and that is the speedy fecundity of the blood they shed; for example, when one sees that of the martyrs flow, one also sees Christianity spread over the earth from the depth of the catacombs; while amongst us, the blood which streamed most abundantly and from such lofty sources, did not find soil equally well prepared. And the illustrious historian exclaims sadly: "The supreme consolation has been refused to our greatest dead; their blood has not been a seed of virtue and independence for their posterity. If they should reappear once more, they would feel themselves tortured again, and on a worse scaffold, by the denial of their descendants; they would hurl at us again the same adieu: 'O Liberty! how they have betrayed thee!'"
[1]Ami du Peuple, No. 429.
[2]Ami du Peuple, No. 539.
[3]La Publiciste de la République, No. 211.
[4] Edgar Quinet,La Révolution, t. 11.
Abbey prison, the, massacre of the prisoners of,363.
Ankarstroem, Captain, the assassin of Gustavus III.,37,41.
Arles, Archbishop of, massacre of,364.
Assassins, the, of the September massacres,362et seq.; their fate,370.
Assignats created,128.
Aubier, M. d', on the King's unwar-like disposition,288; with the King in the Convent of the Feuillants,330.
Barbaroux, visionary schemes of,271; declares the King might have maintained himself,285; anathemas of, on the Septembrists,381.
Barry, Madame du, her letter to Marie Antoinette,138.
Beaumarchais compared with Dumouriez,95.
Belgium, the invasion of, a failure,136.
Beugnot, Count, his description of Madame Roland,87,92; philosophic remarks of, on woman,108.
Billaud-Varennes,246; at the Abbey,363.
Blanc, M. Louis, quoted,370.
Bonne-Carrère, director of foreign affairs, portrait of,101.
Bossuet quoted,134.
Bouillé, Count de, warns Gustavus III. of the conspiracy against him,38; his judgment on Gustavus III.,43.
Bouillé, Marquis de, suppresses the insurrection at Nancy,111,133.
Brissac, Duke of, his devotion to royalty,137et seq.; intolerable to the Jacobins,141; accused in the Assembly,144; assassinated,147,369.
Brunswick, Duke of, his manifesto,267.
Buzot, Madame Roland's affection for,64; quoted,386.