[1] There is no opportunity here for discussing adequately the clause in the declaration to the effect that every citizen is entitled to concur in making laws. That clause apparently conflicts with what I have said above. My explanation of the discrepancy is based on this: that the declaration is a much tinkered, composite document, made up over a period of many months, and not logical at every point. The clause here mentioned I explain as a direct echo of the elections to the States-General; it was one of the first drafted; its precise significance was soon lost sight of and its inconsistency remained unnoticed.
{139}
The event of the 20th of June was like lightning flashing in darkness. Instantly people saw where they were. Moderate, loyal, reasonable men, startled at the danger of the King, smarting at the indignity he had suffered, fearful of mob rule and mob violence, rallied to the throne, signed petitions protesting against the event. Louis himself, realizing that his life was in jeopardy, made appeals both to the assembly and to his people.
The first reply to the King's appeal, unsolicited and unappreciated, came from La Fayette. On receiving news of the event of the 20th he left his headquarters and reached Paris on the 28th. He appealed to the assembly and rallied the centre, still responsive if a leader could be found. He then began to concert measures for getting control of the city by means of the national guards. At this point, however, his scheme failed. The Court {140} would not support him, the King too prudent, the Queen too impolitic. Marie Antoinette herself, it is said, in her rancorous dislike of La Fayette, gave Pétion the secret as to his contemplated use of the national guards; and this proved fatal. Checked by the action of the mayor and the Jacobins, unsupported by the Tuileries, La Fayette had to abandon his efforts.
Another attempt followed. The Department of the Seine, presided by La Rochefoucauld, tried to assert its constitutional authority over the great city situated within its limits. It voted the suspension of Pétion, mayor of Paris, and of Manuel, his procureur, for dereliction of duty in failing to maintain order on the 20th of June.
The action of La Rochefoucauld in suspending Pétion took place on the 7th of July, a moment at which the advance of the Duke of Brunswick was momentarily expected and at which the national excitement was tending to overpower the royalist reaction. This reaction was now checked. The Jacobins were resolved to use mob pressure to whatever extent was necessary for accomplishing their purpose. On the 11th they passed through the assembly a declaration that the country was in danger, and two days later imposed a vote quashing the {141} action of the Department and reinstating Pétion.
The ferment now blended inextricably the war fever and the action against the King. Volunteers were enrolling for the army. National guards were being summoned from the provinces to renew the federation of 1791, and the violent section of the agitators saw in these national guards the means for pushing over the royal authority. A demonstration better organized than that of the 20th of June, and armed, could rid France of the Bourbon incubus. Preparations for such a demonstration were at once taken in hand.
Among the provincial troops now assembled in or marching towards Paris, there was no body more remarkable than the battalion of the 300 Marseillais. Like a whirlwind of patriotic emotion they swept through France, dragging the cannon with which they meant to knock at the gates of the Tuileries, chanting Rouget's new song forever to be associated with the name of their own city. These Marseillais were red-hot republicans, and in judging the political situation of that moment this constitutes one of the salient points. The Parisian patriots were on the whole far less republican than those of the provinces. {142} Among the men who were organizing the new demonstration the greater part meant nothing more than ridding themselves of Louis, of an executive officer whom they regarded as treacherous and as secretly in league with the enemy. What should come after him they did not much consider. In the forming of this state of opinion the individual action of Robespierre had played a great part. Robespierre, who feared in war the opportunity for the soldier, saw in republicanism merely the triumph of a Cromwell; to him La Fayette was a tangible danger, the wordrepublican empty formula. And so, with an influence still widening, despite his opposition to the war, he steadily preached the doctrine that the form of government was nothing so long as civil, social and political equality were secured.
At the parade held on the 14th of July,—the Marseillais had not yet arrived,—there were no cries ofVive le roi, and none of,Vive la république, butVive la nationwas the adopted formula. Yet at the same moment Billaud-Varennes, one of the most advanced of the Jacobins, was addressing the Club in favour of a republic; and thefédérésformed a central committee which on the 17th petitioned the {143} assembly for the suspension of the King. To support the movement further the section committees were decreed in continuous session, and came under the control of the organization.
On the 30th of July, Brunswick crossed the frontier; the advance of his columns was heralded by a proclamation or manifesto. In this document he announced to the people of France that he entered the country as the ally of their sovereign, and with the purpose of visiting on Paris an "exemplary and never-to-be-forgotten vengeance … military execution and total subversion," and of bringing "the guilty rebels to the death they have deserved." Copies of the manifesto reached Paris on the 3rd of August, with immediate effect. To Louis the Prussian general's utterances appeared so incredible that they were promptly disavowed as a forgery. To the people they confirmed the suspicion that had been rankling for three long years, that had been envenomed by all the poison of Marat. A howl of execration arose, a howl not against Brunswick but against the inmates of the Tuileries; and in that howl the voices of the Marseillais, who had just reached the city, were raised loudest.
{144} The inevitable result followed in just one week, a week spent in preparations by the popular leaders. At one o'clock in the morning of the 10th of August delegates from the sections met at the Hotel de Ville and assumed control of the city. This body was joined by Danton, Marat and Hébert, among others, and of these Danton more than anyone else represented the driving power. Orders were given for ringing the tocsin. All Paris knew the movement was coming, and understood the signal.
At the Tuileries preparations for resistance had been made. The Marquis de Mandat took charge of the defence. He had about 1,500 well-disposed national guards from the western or middle class districts, and about 1,000 excellent Swiss infantry of the King's household troops. These he posted to good advantage, guarding the palace and the bridges over the Seine to the south. For a while all went well. The insurrection began slowly; and when it did roll up as far as the bridges Mandat's musketry held it easily at bay.
The insurrectional Commune now realized that Mandat was a considerable obstacle and set to work to remove him. In his official station as a national guard commander he was {145} under the jurisdiction of the mayor, so Pétion was made to write, ordering him to report at the Hotel de Ville. Mandat declined to obey. The attack still hung fire. The order was repeated. Mandat, this time, weakly allowed himself to be persuaded into compliance. He proceeded to the Hotel de Ville,—and was butchered on the stairs by a band of insurgents.
After the defence had lost its general, and with daylight over the scene, events moved fast. The national guards at the palace could not be kept to their posts in the absence of their chief and in presence of the swelling numbers of the attackers. The defence of the bridges had to be given up and the Swiss withdrew into the palace. A lull followed while the insurrection gathered up its strength for the attack on the Tuileries itself.
During that lull, at half past eight, Louis, with his family, left the palace. He believed resistance useless; he feared a massacre might occur; he was averse as ever to bloodshed; and so was persuaded that his best course would be to seek refuge in the assembly.
Just as Louis left, the real attack was delivered on the palace. The Swiss replied with musketry, sallied out, charged the insurgents {146} and drove them across the Carrousel; then they returned, and presently received a written order from the King bidding them not to fire. This momentarily paralyzed the defence. The insurgents, led by the provincialfédérés, were not yet beaten, but flowed back once more to the attack. Some field pieces which they had, breached the palace doors, a sharp struggle followed, and soon the insurgents had got a foothold. What followed was a massacre. Many of the Swiss were cut down in the corridors and rooms of the palace. Others were mown down by musketry trying to escape across the Tuileries gardens. A few got away and sought refuge in a near-by church, but were there overtaken by the popular fury, and butchered. The rage of the people was unbridled, and success turned it into ferocity, even bestiality. The bodies of the Swiss were mutilated in an atrocious fashion.
While the triumphant insurgents were sacking the palace and committing their barbarities on the unfortunate Swiss, Louis and his family remained unmolested in the assembly. They were to remain there for three days while their fate was being decided, temporary accommodation being found for them. The situation was really this, that no party was yet {147} quite prepared for the destruction of the King himself, only of the royal power. The assembly which, a year earlier, had assumed the position that the King was necessary to the constitution had now virtually abandoned it, and the Commune, while going much further than the assembly, was not yet ready to strike Louis. But it did claim the custody of the royal family, and that, after a three days' struggle, the assembly conceded. On the 13th of August the royal family went to imprisonment in the Temple, a small mediaeval dungeon in the central quarter of Paris.
Only about three hundred members of the assembly were present to face the storm when Louis sought refuge in its midst. Vergniaud was president. Presently the Commune sent a request that the assembly should depose the King. Vergniaud thereupon proposed a middle course; the assembly could suspend the King from his functions and call together a convention to solve the constitutional question that the suspension of the Executive presented; in the meanwhile ministers elected by the assembly should constitute a provisional Executive Council. These proposals were carried, and the Executive Council was elected; it contained most of the members of the {148} Brissotin ministry, but with a new member. At the head of the poll was Danton, and Danton was made Minister of Justice.
Danton now clearly appears as the man of the situation. The people had triumphed, and Danton was the statesman of the people. He bridged the gap between the Commune and the assembly. He gave rein to the popular fury and to the destruction of every anti-popular influence, and he attempted, by placing himself at the head of the flood, to direct it against the great external danger that menaced France.
On the 11th of August the assembly decreed that universal suffrage should be put in force for the elections to the convention. Large police powers were voted to the Commune, which Robespierre now joined; and laws were passed aimed against those suspected of being in sympathy with the advancing army or with Louis. Theappel nominalwas placed in force in many of the sections, and Danton put the machinery of his ministry at work to reinforce these measures, to convert them to use for terrorizing the moderates, for satisfying the popular suspicions against the aristocrats, for weighing on the elections. The primaries were to begin on the 27th of August, those for Paris {149} on the 2d of September; the meeting of electors for nominating the deputies of Paris was to take place on the 5th of September.
Meanwhile Brunswick's columns were making steady, methodical progress through the hills of Lorraine, through the frontier belt of fortresses. The French armies in their front were weak in numbers, even weaker in leadership. La Fayette, who had attempted to reaffirm the constitution on hearing of the event of the 10th of August, deemed it prudent to ride over the frontier when commissioners of the assembly reached his camp; he was seized as a prisoner by the allies to remain their captive for many years. On the 20th the Prussian guns opened on Longwy; on the 23rd it surrendered. On the 30th the siege of Verdun was begun, Verdun which Louis had so nearly reached the year before. It was generally known that the fortress could not stand more than a few days. Between it and Paris there was only the Argonne, a few miles of hilly passes, and then 100 miles of open country.
The steady advance of Brunswick drove Paris into a state approaching delirium. On the news of the fall of Longwy reaching the city, the extremists, their appetites whetted by {150} the butchery of the Swiss, began to plot a massacre of the political prisoners, of the royalists, of the suspect. On the 28th of August Danton, riding on the wings of the storm, asked power from the Commune to carry out domiciliary visits for the purpose of arresting suspects. This power was granted, and in three days the prisons were filled to overflowing, priests and persons of title being specially singled out for arrest.
By the 1st of September Paris was ready to answer the Duke of Brunswick, was ready for the stroke that was to destroy the anti-revolutionists, that was to strike terror to the hearts of all enemies of the people. But the awfulness of the deed delayed its execution. The day passed in high-wrought excitement; at any moment news might arrive of the fall of Verdun,—that might be the signal for the explosion of the popular fury.
On the 2d there was still no news of Verdun, but the moment could not be delayed much longer. In the night preparations had been made. Men to do the business of popular execution had been approached; some had been offered pay. The leaders were determined to carry through their enterprise. In the assembly Danton thundered from the tribune: {151} "Verdun has not yet surrendered. One part of the people will march to the frontier, another will throw up intrenchments, and the rest will defend our cities with pikes. Paris will second these great efforts. The assembly will become a war committee. We demand that whoever refuses to serve shall be punished by death. The tocsin you will hear presently is not a signal of alarm; it is ringing the charge against the enemies of our country. To conquer them we must be audacious, yet more audacious, and still more audacious, and France is saved."
The tocsin rang, as Danton had ordered; alarm guns were fired; drummers woke the echoes of the streets and of the squares, and presently the deed of supreme audacity and of supreme horror began to come into being. Crowds collected about the prisons. Groups forced a way in. More or less improvised committees took possession, and massacre began.
The massacre of September is one of the most lurid events of the Revolution, easier therefore for the romancist to deal with than for the historian. Its horrors are quite beyond question. At one point, Bicêtre, the killing continued until late on the 6th, nearly four days. The {152} total number of victims was very large, possibly between 2,000 and 3,000. At many places the slaughter was indiscriminate, accompanied by nameless barbarities, carried out by gangs of brutal ruffians who were soon intoxicated with gore and with wine. But alongside of these aspects were others more difficult to do justice to, but the careful weighing of which is necessary if any just estimate of the event is to be reached.
The massacring was carried out by a small number of individuals, perhaps two or three hundred in all, and of these a considerable proportion undoubtedly acted in a spirit of blind political and social rage, and in the belief that they were carrying out an act of justice. A large mass of citizens gave the massacres their approval by forming crowds about the prison doors. As to these crowds there are two salient facts. The first is that on the first day they were large and excited, and afforded that moral support without which the massacres could hardly have been carried out. After the first day they diminished rapidly; and by the end of the third day all popular support was gone, and a feeling of horror had seized on the city and supplanted everything else. Then again the mob, as it crowded about the {153} prison doors, showed a marked attitude. Many of the prisoners, those who were so lucky as to pass for good citizens and friends of the people, were released. As these came out the crowd received them with every sign of joy and of fraternization. When on the contrary it was a victim coming out to be slaughtered, there was silence, no shouting, no exultation.
In other words, the event was, with most, an act of popular justice, and this was the appearance it had even when seen from the interior of the prisons. At l'Abbaye Maillard presided over the self-appointed tribunal, and it is impossible to doubt that, whenever he was satisfied that the prisoner deserved his freedom, he attempted to secure his life. The case of St. Méard, an aristocrat, a colonel, who had enough good sense and courage to speak plainly to the judges, avowing himself a royalist but persuading them that he took no part in anti-revolutionary schemes, is most illuminating. Maillard declared he saw no harm in him; he was acquitted; and was fraternally embraced by the crowd when he safely passed the fatal door.
All did not have the good fortune of St. Méard. The case of the Princesse de {154} Lamballe, at La Force, must serve to give the worst side of, and to close, this chapter of blood. Long the friend, confidante and agent of the Queen, she had followed her to the Temple, and had been removed from there but a few days previously. She was too well known and too near Marie Antoinette to have any chance of escape. In a fainting condition she was dragged before the tribunal, and was soon passed out to the executioners. It is not probable that she had much consciousness of what followed. The gang of murderers at this point were butchers of the Halles, and they apparently treated their victim as they might have a beast brought to the slaughter. She was carried under the arms to where a pile of bodies had accumulated, and, in a moment made ready, was butchered in the technical sense of the term. Her head was hoisted on a pike, as also other parts of her dismembered anatomy, and carried in triumph to be displayed under the windows of the prisoners at the Temple.
Verdun fell on the 2d of September, at the very moment when Danton was announcing its continued resistance. On the 5th the Duke of Brunswick resumed his march on Paris, and {155} on the same day, the electors of that city met and chose twenty deputies to the convention; their choice was coloured by the fact that the massacres were still continuing. At the head of the poll stood Robespierre; Danton was next; among the others may be noted Camille Desmoulins, Marat, and, last of all, the duc d'Orléans, who a few days later metamorphosed his Bourbon name into PhilippeEgalité.
Throughout France the electoral process was everywhere giving much the same result. Less than one-tenth of the electors used their franchise; and the extreme party won great successes. By the middle of September the new deputies were reaching Paris. TheLégislativein its last moments was feeble and undignified. Marat threatened it with massacre, and declared that its members were as much the enemies of the country as were the imprisoned aristocrats. Under this menace the Législative watched the massacres of September without raising a hand to protect its unfortunate victims. Danton did the same. As minister of Justice the prisoners and the tribunals were under his special charge. But although he may have facilitated the escape of some individuals, and although he took no direct {156} part, yet he believed that no government could be established strong enough to save the Revolution, at such a crisis as it had reached, save by paying this toll of blood to the suspicion, the vengeance, the cruelty, the justice of the people. He dared to pay the price, and later he, and he alone, dared to shoulder the responsibility.
{157}
On the 20th and 21st of September 1792 the Convention met, the Bourbon monarchy fell, and the Duke of Brunswick was defeated, a coincidence of memorable events.
Brunswick, pushing on from Verdun into the defiles of the Argonne, had two armies operating against him, trying to stop his march; the one under Dumouriez, the other under Kellermann. He forced a way, however, but at the further side, about the hills of Valmy, had to face the combined armies of his adversaries. Brunswick was now much reduced by sickness, and was much worried over supplies and his lengthening line of communications. In a faint-hearted way he deployed for attack. Dumouriez for the moment checked him by a skillful disposition of his superior artillery. But if the superbly drilled Prussian infantry were sent forward it seemed as though the result could not be long in doubt. {158} Brunswick methodically and slowly made his preparations for the attack, but just at the moment when it should have been delivered, Dumouriez, divining his opponent's hesitation, imposed on him. Riding along the French front with his staff he placed his hat on the point of his sword and rode forward, singing the Marseillaise. His whole army catching the refrain advanced towards the enemy; and Brunswick at once took up a defensive attitude, which he maintained till the close of the battle. The unsteady battalions and half-drilled volunteers of Dumouriez had suddenly revealed the fact that they were a national army, and that they possessed the most formidable of military weapons, patriotism. That was an innovation in 18th-century warfare, an innovation that was to result in some notable triumphs. At Valmy it led to the Prussians retiring from a battle field on which they had left only a few score of dead. Soon afterwards Brunswick began a retreat that was to lead him back to the Rhine.
On the day after Valmy, the Convention assembled. The extreme Jacobins, soon to be known from their seats in the assembly as the Mountain, numbered about fifty. Danton and {159} Robespierre were the two most conspicuous; among their immediate supporters not hitherto mentioned may be noted Carnot, Fouché, Tallien, and St. Just. A much larger group, of which the moderate Jacobins formed the backbone, were inclined to look to Brissot for leadership and are generally described as Girondins. This name came from the small group of the deputies of the Gironde, that represented perhaps better than any other, the best force of provincial liberalism but at the same time a revolt against terrorism, massacre and the supremacy of Paris. Within the last sixty years, however, the term Girondin has come into use as a label for all those positive political elements in the Convention that attempted a struggle against the Mountain for leadership and against Paris for moderate and national government. Among the Girondins may be noted Brissot, Vergniaud, Condorcet; and the Anglo-American veteran of republicanism, Tom Paine. Between the Mountain and the Gironde sat the Plaine, or the Marais, as it was called, that non-committal section of the house strongest in numbers but weakest in moral courage, where sat such men as Barras, Barère, Cambon, Grégoire, Lanjuinais, {160} Sieyès. These were the men who mostly drifted, and, as the Mountain triumphed, threw into it many more or less sincere recruits.
The first business of the new assembly was pressing; it did not comport much variation of opinion. The constitutional question must be settled; and so a vote, immediately taken, pronounced the fall of the monarchy. Even at this moment, however, there was no enthusiasm for a republic and there was no formal pronouncement that France accepted that régime. Yet in fact she had; and on the following day the Convention, in further decrees, assumed the existence of the Republic to be an established fact.
There was a question, however, even more burning, because more debatable, than the fall of the monarchy; and this was the massacres, and beyond the massacres, the policy of the party that had accepted them. The great majority of the deputies on arriving in Paris from the provinces had been horror-struck. Lanjuinais said: "When I arrived in Paris, I shuddered!" Brissot and the Girondins put that feeling of the assembly behind their policy. They adopted an attitude of uncompromising condemnation towards the men of September, and attempted to wrest their influence from {161} them. To accomplish this they had among other things to outbid their rivals for popular support, and so it happened that many of them who were at heart constitutional monarchists adopted a strong republican attitude which went beyond their real convictions.
The Girondins attacked at once. The conduct of the Commune, of the sectional committees was impugned. Marat, on taking his seat, was subjected to a furious onslaught that nearly ended in actual violence. But he packed the galleries with his supporters, retorted bitterly in theAmi du peuple, and succeeded in weathering the storm. But the Convention agreed that a committee of six should investigate, and that a guard of 4,500 men should be drawn from the departments for the protection of the Convention. This was a worthy beginning, but it ended, as it began, in words. Paris answered the Girondins with deeds.
The proposed bringing in of an armed force from the departments stirred Paris to fury once more. Brissot was expelled from the Jacobin Club. Many of the sections presented petitions protesting against the departmental guard. But for a while the moderates held their ground, even appeared to gain a {162} little. Addresses kept reaching the assembly from the departments protesting against the domination of Paris. Small detachments of loyal national guards arrived in the city; and in November, on an election being held for the mayoralty of Paris, although very few voters went to the polls, the Jacobins failed to carry their candidate. It was to be their last defeat before the 9th of Thermidor.
It was at this moment that took place the famous iron chest incident. A safe was discovered and broken open during the perquisitions made in the palace of the Tuileries. Roland placed in the custody of the house a packet of papers found in this safe, and among these papers were accounts showing the sums paid to Mirabeau, and to other members of the assembly, by the Court. There resulted much abuse of Mirabeau, whose body was removed from the Pantheon where it had been ceremoniously interred, and also much political pressure on deputies who either were or feared to be incriminated.
A number of the young Girondins were now meeting constantly at Madame Roland's, and their detestation of the Mountain was heightened and idealized by the enthusiasms of their charming hostess. Louvet, brilliant, {163} ambitious, hot-headed, threw himself into the conflict, and, on the 29th of October, launched a tremendous philippic against Robespierre. As oratory it was successful, but it failed in political effect. After their ill success against Marat, the Girondins stood no chance of success against Robespierre unless their words led to immediate action, unless their party was solid and organized, unless they had some means of obtaining a practical result. In all this they failed. Robespierre obtained a delay to prepare his reply, and then a careful speech and packed galleries triumphed over Louvet's ill-judged attack.
The Mountain had survived the first storms. It was soon able to use the question of the King as a means of distracting attention from the massacres, and of giving the party a ground on which it might hope to meet the Gironde on more even terms. For any attempt at moderation on the part of the Girondins could be met with the charge of veiled royalism, of anti-patriotism, and such a charge at that moment was the most damning that a party or an individual could incur.
The Convention, having agreed that it would consider the question of Louis, and having appointed a committee to that end, heard the {164} report of its committee on the 3rd of November. From this it appeared that there were numerous charges that could be preferred against Louis; but what was the tribunal before which such charges could be tried? There could be but one answer. Only the people of France could judge Louis, and the Convention stood for the people. Lengthy debates followed on these questions, and the speech of Robespierre, a speech in which he stood nearly alone in taking a logical view of the situation, was perhaps its most remarkable product. Robespierre said: "The assembly has been drawn off on side issues. There is no question here of a legal action. Louis is not an accused person; you are not judges,—you are only representatives of the nation. It is not for you to render judgment, but to take a measure of national security.… Louis was king, and the republic has come into existence; the wonderful question you are debating is resolved by these words. Louis was dethroned for his crimes; Louis denounced the people of France as rebels; he called to chastise them the armies of his brother tyrants to his help; victory and the people have decided that he alone is the rebel; Louis therefore cannot be judged because he has been judged. He {165} stands condemned, or if not, then the republic stands not acquitted.… For if Louis can be the subject of an action, Louis may be pronounced guiltless.… A people does not judge after the manner of a judicial body; it does not render sentence, it launches the thunderbolt."
On the same day, the 3rd of December, without accepting Robespierre's point of view, the Convention voted that the King should be brought to trial. The Gironde, feeling the current now drawing them fast to a catastrophe, attempted, in feeble fashion, to change its direction, urging that an appeal should be made to the country. This failed, and a week later Louis was brought before the assembly.
The royal family had been kept in very strict confinement at the Temple. The Commune officials in whose charge they were placed were for the most part men of the lower classes, brutal, arrogant, suspicious, and somewhat oppressed with responsibility and the fear of possible attempts at a rescue. In these conditions the royal family suffered severely, and, under suffering, rapidly began to regain some of the ground they had lost while fortune smiled. Against insult the royal dignity asserted itself, and in adversity the simplicity and {166} kindliness of Louis began rather suddenly to look like something not so very remote from saintliness; such is the relation of surroundings and background to the effect produced by a man's life and character.
Before the Convention, on the 11th of December, Louis, mild and dignified, listened in some bewilderment to a long list of so-called charges, of which the most salient accused him of complicity with Bouillé in a plot against his subjects, and of having broken his oath to the constitution. When asked what answer he had to make, he denied the charges, and demanded time to prepare a defence and to obtain legal assistance. This was granted, and an adjournment was taken. From all of which it appears that Louis accepted the false ground which the Convention had marked out for him, and lacked the logical sense of Robespierre.
During the adjournment, which was for two weeks, the Girondins made one more attempt to dodge the issue, to refer the trial of the King to the electorate. Behind them was a great mass of opinion. The department of Finisterre passed resolutions demanding the suspension of Marat, Robespierre and {167} Danton; it approached the neighbouring departments with a view to combining their armed forces and sending them to Paris. Even with such demonstrations to strengthen their hands the Girondins were in too false a position, were too much orators and not men of action, to save themselves; Paris held them inexorably to their detested task.
On the 26th, the trial was resumed, and, save for judgment, concluded. Louis was in charge of Santerre, commanding the national guard of Paris. His advocates, Malesherbes, Tronchet and de Sèze, did their duty with courage and ability, after which the King was removed, and the Convention resolved itself into a disorderly and clamorous meeting in which the public galleries added as much to the din as the members themselves.
More debates followed, of which the turn was reached on the 3rd of January. On that day Barère, most astute of those who sat in the centre, keenest to detect the tremor of the straw that showed which way public passion was about to blow, ascended the tribune and delivered his opinion. Anxiously the house hung on the words of the oracle of moral cowardice, and heard that oracle pronounce {168} the destruction of the King as a measure of public safety. From that moment all attempts to save him were in vain.
The Girondins did not confine themselves to numerous efforts to displace the responsibility of judging from the Convention to the people. Three days after Barère's speech Dumouriez arrived in Paris. As La Fayette had a few months before, so did Dumouriez now, appear to be the man of the sword so dreaded by Robespierre, the successful soldier ready to convert the Revolution to his own profit, or if not to his own to that of his party, the Girondins. During more than two weeks Dumouriez remained in the city, casting about for some means of saving the King, but constantly checked by the Jacobins, who through Pache, minister of war, kept control of the artillery and troops near Paris.
On the 15th of January the Convention came to a vote, amid scenes of intense excitement. Was Louis guilty? And if so what should be his punishment? Six hundred and eighty-three members voted affirmatively to the first question. Three hundred and sixty-one voted the penalty of death. About the same number equivocated in a variety of forms, the most popular proving the one that declared for {169} imprisonment or exile, to be changed to death in case of invasion. Vergniaud, as president, at the end of a session that lasted 36 hours, declared the sentence of the Convention to be death.
On the 19th of January one last effort was made. A motion for a respite was proposed, but was rejected, 380 to 310; and the Convention then fixed the 21st as the day for the King's execution. On that day Louis accordingly went to the scaffold. The guillotine was set up in the great open space known at various epochs as the Place Louis XV, de la Revolution, and de la Concorde. Louis, after a touching farewell from his family, and after confessing whatever he imagined to be his sins, was driven from the Temple to the place of execution; he was dressed in white. The streets were thronged. The national guard was out in force, and when Louis from the platform attempted to speak, Santerre ordered his drums to roll. A moment later the head of King Louis XVI had fallen, and many mourning royalists were vowing loyalty in their hearts to the little boy of eight, imprisoned in the temple, who to them was King Louis XVII.
{170}
The disappearance of Louis XVI from the scene left the Mountain and the Gironde face to face, to wage their faction fight, a fight to the knife; while France in her armies more nobly maintained her greater struggle on the frontier. There for a while after Valmy all had prospered. Brunswick had fallen back to Coblenz. A French army under the Marquis de Custine had overrun all the Rhineland as far as Mainz. Dumouriez, transferred from the Ardennes to the Belgian frontier, had invaded the Austrian Netherlands. On the 6th of November he won a considerable victory at Jemmappes, and towards the end of December, he controlled most of the province.
The Convention, elated at these successes, issued decrees proclaiming a crusade against the European tyrannies, and announcing the propaganda of the principles of liberty. But in practice the French invasion did not {171} generally produce very edifying results. Generals and troops plundered unmercifully, to make up for the disorganization of their own service and lack of pay, and even the French Government imposed the expenses of the war on the countries that had to support its horrors.
The close of the year 1792 marked a period of success. The opening of 1793, however, saw the pendulum swing back. New enemies gathered about France. Sardinia, whose province of Savoy had been invaded, now had a considerable army in the field. At short intervals after the execution of Louis, England, Holland, Spain, joined the coalition. And the Convention light-heartedly accepted this accumulation of war. To face the storm it appointed in January a committee of general defence of twenty-five members; but Danton alone would have done better than the twenty-five. While the trial of the King proceeded he was casting about for support in the assembly for a constructive policy. He stretched a hand to the Girondins; they refused it; and Danton turned back to the Mountain once more, compelled to choose between two factions the one that was for the moment willing to act with him.
{172} Through February and into March the military situation kept getting worse, and the Mountain made repeated attacks on the Gironde. On the 5th of March news reached Paris that the Austrians had captured Aix-la-Chapelle, and that the French general Miranda had been compelled to abandon his guns and to retire from before Maestricht, which he was besieging. Danton, who was in the north, arranging the annexation of the Netherlands to France, started for Paris at once. On the 14th the capital heard, with amazement and alarm, that the Vendée had risen in arms for God and King Louis XVII.
The Vendée was a large district of France, a great part of the ancient province of Poitou, lying just to the south of the Loire and near the Atlantic Ocean. A great part of the country was cut up by tracts of forest and thick and numerous hedges. The peasants were fairly prosperous, and well-affected to the priests and seigneurs. The latter were mostly resident landlords, holders of small estates, living near and on kindly terms with their peasantry. The priests and nobles had long viewed the Revolution with aversion, an aversion intensified by the proclamation of the Republic and the execution of the King. And {173} when, on the 26th of February, the Convention passed an army ballot law and sent agents to press recruits among the villages of the Vendée, the peasants joined their natural leaders and rose in arms against the Government. The Vendéens were, in their own country, formidable opponents. They had born leaders, men who showed wonderful courage, dash, and loyalty. They prayed before charging an enemy, and on the march or in battle sang hymns, always the most irresistible of battle songs. Their badges were the white flag, the Bourbon lilies, and the cross. For awhile they swept everything before them.
Danton arrived in Paris on the 8th of March. He immediately attempted to reconcile the factions of the assembly, and to persuade its members to turn their wasted vigour into war measures. From neither side did he receive much encouragement. To his demands for new levies and volunteer regiments, Robespierre replied that the most urgent step was to purify the army of its anti-revolutionary elements. To his proposal that the executive should be strengthened by composing the ministry of members of the Convention, the Girondins opposed their implacable suspicion and hatred. But Paris had long been working up {174} its hostility to the Gironde; an insurrectional committee had just come into existence that aimed at dealing with them after the fashion in which it had dealt with Louis on the 10th of August; and the Girondins' stand against Danton precipitated the outbreak.
On the 9th of March a premature and imperfectly organized insurrection occurred, directed against the Gironde. The demonstrators marched against the Convention, but were held in check by a few hundred well-affected provincial national guards. On the 10th it became known that Dumouriez was severely pressed by the Austrians and in danger of being cut off. Under the influence of this news, and with the Girondins showing little fight because of the event of the day before, the Convention passed a measure of terrorism; it voted the establishment of a Revolutionary Tribunal to judge "traitors, conspirators, and anti-revolutionists." In vain Buzot and other Girondins pointed out that this meant establishing "a despotism worse than the old." Danton, unquenchably opportunist, supported the measure, and it was carried. Immediately after this he left Paris for the frontier once more. On the 18th of March Dumouriez was severely defeated at Neerwinden. And now not {175} only was the Vendée in arms, but Lyons, Marseilles, Normandy, appeared on the point of throwing off the yoke of Paris and of the Jacobins; the situation looked well-nigh desperate. A week later the papers published letters of Dumouriez which showed that ever since the trial of the King the Girondin general had been factious, that is, had been as much inclined to turn his arms against Paris as against the Austrians. Danton was now back from the frontier; he and Robespierre were at once elected to the committee of general defence; and that committee declared itself in continuous session.
Extraordinary measures were now passed in quick succession which, added to the creation of the Revolutionary Tribunal, made up a formidable machinery of terrorism. Deputies of the Convention were sent out on mission to superintend the working of the armies and of the internal police. They were given the widest powers,—were virtually made pro-dictators. On the 1st of April was passed a new law of suspects to reinforce the action of the representatives on mission and of the Revolutionary Tribunal. On the 6th of April was created the executive power that Danton urged the need of so pertinaciously; this was the Committee of {176} Public Safety, a body of nine members of the Convention, acting secretly, directing the ministers, and having general control of the executive functions. The Girondins had to submit to the measure, and their opponents secured control of the Committee. Among its first members were Danton, Cambon, and Barère.
Just as the Committee of Public Safety came into existence the situation on the frontier was getting even worse. On the 4th of April Dumouriez, fearing that the Convention would send him to the Revolutionary Tribunal, made an attempt to turn his army against the Government, and failing, rode over into the Austrian lines. At the same time, Custine was being driven out of Alsace by the Prussians, who, on the 14th of April, laid siege to Mainz.
With the Mountain immensely strengthened by the formation of the Committee of Public Safety, the attack on the Girondins increased in vigour. Robespierre accused them of complicity with Dumouriez in treasonable intentions against the Republic. The Gironde retaliated, and, on the 13th of April, succeeded in rallying a majority of the Convention in a second onslaught against Marat for his incendiary articles. It was decreed that theAmi du peupleshould be sent to the Revolutionary {177} Tribunal. It was the last success of the Girondins, and it did not carry them far. The Jacobins closed their ranks against this assault. They had the Commune and the Revolutionary Tribunal under their control. The former body sent a petition to the Convention demanding the exclusion of twenty-two prominent Girondins as enemies of the Revolution; and a few days later the Tribunal absolved Marat of all his sins.
Incidentally to the bitter struggle between the two factions, great questions, social, political, economic, were being debated, though not with great results. They could really all be brought back to the one fundamental question which the course of the Revolution had brought to the surface. What was to be the position of the poor man, and especially of the poor man in the modern city and under industrial surroundings,—what was to be his position in the new form of social adjustment which the Revolution was bringing about? What about the price of food? the monopoly of capital? the private ownership of property? Such were some of the questions that underlay the debates of the Convention in the spring of 1793.
The food question was dealt with in various {178} ways. The famous law of the Maximum, passed on the 3rd of May, attempted to regulate the prices of food by a sliding scale tariff. The measure was economically unsound, and in many ways worked injustice; it alarmed property holders and alienated them from the Government. On its own initiative the Commune made great efforts, and with some success, to maintain the food supply of the city, and to keep down the price of bread. Spending about 12,000 francs a day, less than half a sou per head, it succeeded for the most part in keeping bread down to about 3 sous per pound.
But by virtue of what theory of government were the poor entitled to this special protection? Was the Jacobin party prepared to advance towards a socialist or collectivist form of government? Of that there was no sign; and several years were yet to pass before Babeuf was to give weight to a collectivist theory of the State. There were special reasons of some force to explain why the Convention, however much it might be addicted to humanitarian theories, however anxious it might be to curry favour with the lowest class, should keep a stiff attitude on the question of collectivism and property. The whole financial system of the Revolution, endorsed by the {179} Convention as by its predecessors, was based on the private proprietorship of land and on increasing the number of small proprietors. Not only was the Convention bound to maintain the effect of the large sales of national lands that had already taken place, but the prejudices and temper of its members made in the same direction. Robespierre, trying to reconcile the narrow logic of a lawyer with the need of pleasing his ardent supporters, based his position on a charitable and not on a political motive: "Public assistance is a sacred debt of Society. Society is under the obligation of securing a living for all its members, either by procuring work for them, or by securing the necessaries of existence to those who are past work."
Although the Convention maintained a conservative attitude in regard to the question of real property, it was decidedly inclined towards a confiscatory policy in all that related to personal wealth. This did not, however, become well marked until after the conclusion of the great struggle between the Mountain and the Gironde, which entered its last phase in May.
On the 12th of that month the Convention voted the formation of an army ofsans-culottesfor the defence of Paris, a measure of more {180} significance for the internal than for the external affairs of France. On the 14th the Gironde made their reply by reading an address of the city of Bordeaux offering to march to Paris to help the Convention. On the 15th the Commune proceeded to appoint one of its nominees as provisional general of the national guard of Paris. And on the following day the Girondins, alarmed into an attempt at action, proposed to the assembly that the municipal authorities of Paris should be removed from office and that the substitutes for the deputies to the Convention should be assembled at Bourges in case the Convention itself should be attacked and destroyed. This last proposal was highly characteristic of the Girondins, heroic as orators, but as members of a political party always timid of action.
The Committee of Public Safety, already tuned to its higher duties and viewing the faction fight of the assembly with some slight degree of detachment, steered a middle and politic course. Barère proposed a compromise, which the Girondins weakly accepted. But its enemies continued strenuous action, formed a new insurrectional committee, and set Hébert's infamous sheet, thePère Duchesne, {181} howling for their blood. This newspaper deserves a few lines.
Hébert, a man of the middle class, after a stormy youth drifted into revolutionary journalism. With much verve, and a true Voltairian spirit, he at first took up a moderate attitude, but being a time server soon discovered that his interest lay in another direction. From the middle of 1792 he rose rapidly to great popularity by his loud defence of extreme courses. ThePère Duchesne, copies of which are at this day among the greatest of bibliographical curiosities, was written for the people and in a jargon out-Heroding their own, a compound of oaths and obscenities. ThePère Duchesnewas nearly always in a state ofgrande joieor ofgrande colère, and at the epoch we have reached his anger is being continuously poured out, the filthiest stream of invective conceivable, against the Girondins.
With Marat and Hébert fanning the flames, the insurrectional committee drew up a new list of 32 suspect deputies. The Committee of Public Safety, appealed to by the Girondins, ordered the arrest of Hébert. On the following day, the 25th of May, the Commune demanded his release. Isnard, one of the {182} Gironde, that day acting as president of the Convention, answered the deputation of the Commune with unbridled anger, and concluded by declaring that if Paris dared to lay one finger on a member of the Convention, the city would be destroyed. There was in this an unfortunate echo of the Duke of Brunswick's manifesto.
On the 26th Robespierre, at the Jacobin Club, gave his formal assent to the proposal that an insurrection should be organized against the Gironde. Two days later Hébert was released, and the Commune and the committees of the sections began organizing the movement. As a first step Hanriot, a sottish but very determined battalion leader, was placed in supreme command of the national guard.
The movement took place on the 31st of May. On that day the Convention was subjected to the organized pressure of a mob of about 30,000 men, the greater part national guards. The Convention was not invaded, however, nor was there any attempt, any desire, to suppress it as an institution. For the leaders fully realized that it was by maintaining the Convention as a figurehead that they could continue the fiction that the Government {183} of France was not local, or Parisian, but national, or French. But while refraining from a direct attack on the Convention they subjected it to a pressure so strong and so long continued that they converted it, as they intended, into an organ of their will.
For three days Hanriot and his men remained at the doors of the Convention, and for three days, with growing agitation, the members within wrestled with the problem thus insistently presented at the point of bayonets and at the mouth of cannon. Motions of all sorts, some logical, some contradictory, were presented. Robespierre moved the arrest of twenty of his colleagues. The Committee of Public Safety, anxious to retain supreme power, tried for some middle course that might satisfy the mob. Barère proposed that, to relieve the Convention from its difficulty, the Girondins should pronounce their own exclusion from the assembly. The impetuous Isnard, one of the few attacked members present, accepted. This was on the 2d of June.
On the basis of the self-exclusion of the Girondin deputies the Committee of Public Safety now believed it could regain control of the situation, thereby demonstrating that it {184} had formed an inadequate estimate of Hanriot. It decided to proclaim the suppression of the insurrectional committee, and it announced this to Hanriot at the same time as the self-exclusion of the Girondins. But Hanriot, sitting his horse at the doors of the Convention, was resolute and tipsy, a man of the sword not to be moved by parliamentary eloquence. He declined to accept any compromise, and ordered his guns to be brought up and unlimbered. The Convention was immediately stampeded by this act of drunken courage. The members attempted to escape. But every avenue, every street was closed by Hanriot's national guard, and Marat, blandly triumphant, led the members back to the hall sacred to their deliberations. There, ashamed and exhausted, at eleven o'clock that night, the Convention mutilated itself, suspended twenty-two of its members, and ordered the arrest of twenty-nine others.