THE SOCIAL EQUILIBRIUM
I assume it as self-evident that those who, at any given moment, are the strongest in any civilization, will be those who are at once the ruling class, those who own most property, and those who have most influence on legislation. The weaker will fare hardly in proportion to their weakness. Such is the order of nature. But, since those are the strongest through whom nature finds it, for the time being, easiest to vent her energy, and as the whole universe is in ceaseless change, it follows that the composition of ruling classes is never constant, but shifts to correspond with the shifting environment. When this movement is so rapid that men cannot adapt themselves to it, we call the phenomenon a revolution, and it is with revolutions that I now have to do.
Nothing is more certain than that the intellectual adaptability of the individual man is very limited. A ruling class is seldom conscious of its own decay, and most of the worst catastrophes of history have been caused by an obstinate resistance to change when resistance was no longer possible. Thus while an incessant alteration in social equilibrium is inevitable, a revolution is a problem in dynamics, on the correct solution of which the fortunes of a declining class depend.
For example, the modern English landlords replaced the military feudal aristocracy during the sixteenth century, because the landlords had more economic capacity and less credulity. The men who supplanted the mediaeval soldiers in Great Britain had no scruple about robbing the clergy of their land, and because of this quality they prospered greatly. Ultimately the landlords reached high fortune by controlling the boroughs which had, in the Middle Ages, acquired the right to return members to the House of Commons. Their domination lasted long; nevertheless, about 1760, the rising tide of the Industrial Revolution brought forward another type of mind. Flushed by success in the Napoleonic wars the Tories failed to appreciate that the social equilibrium, by the year 1830, had shifted, and that they no longer commanded enough physical force to maintain their parliamentary ascendancy. They thought they had only to be arrogant to prevail, and so they put forward the Duke of Wellington as their champion. They could hardly have made a poorer choice. As Disraeli has very truly said, "His Grace precipitated a revolution which might have been delayed for half a century, and need never have occurred in so aggravated a form." The Duke, though a great general, lacked knowledge of England. He began by dismissing William Huskisson from his Cabinet, who was not only its ablest member, but perhaps the single man among the Tories who thoroughly comprehended the industrial age. Huskisson's issue was that the franchise of the intolerably corrupt East Retford should be given to Leeds or Manchester. Having got rid of Huskisson, the Duke declared imperiously that he would concede nothing to the disfranchised industrial magnates, nor to the vast cities in which they lived. A dissolution of Parliament followed and in the election the Tories were defeated. Although Wellington may not have been a sagacious statesman, he was a capable soldier and he knew when he could and when he could not physically fight. On this occasion, to again quote Disraeli, "He rather fled than retired." He induced his friends to absent themselves from the House of Lords and permit the Reform Bill to become law. Thus the English Tories, by their experiment with the Duke of Wellington, lost their boroughs and with them their political preeminence, but at least they saved themselves, their families, and the rest of their property. As a class they have survived to this day, although shorn of much of the influence which they might very probably have retained had they solved more correctly the problem of 1830. In sum, they were not altogether impervious to the exigencies of their environment. The French Revolution is the classic example of the annihilation of a rigid organism, and it is an example the more worthy of our attention as it throws into terrible relief the process by which an intellectually inflexible race may convert the courts of law which should protect their decline into the most awful engine for their destruction.
The essence of feudalism was a gradation of rank, in the nature of caste, based upon fear. The clergy were privileged because the laity believed that they could work miracles, and could dispense something more vital even than life and death. The nobility were privileged because they were resistless in war. Therefore, the nobility could impose all sorts of burdens upon those who were unarmed. During the interval in which society centralized and acquired more and more a modern economic form, the discrepancies in status remained, while commensurately the physical or imaginative force which had once sustained inequality declined, until the social equilibrium grew to be extremely unstable. Add to this that France, under the monarchy, was ill consolidated. The provinces and towns retained the administrative complexity of an archaic age, even to local tariffs. Thus under the monarchy privilege and inequality pervaded every phase of life, and, as the judiciary must be, more or less, the mouthpiece of society, the judiciary came to be the incarnation of caste.
Speaking broadly, the judicial office, under the monarchy, was vendible. In legal language, it was an incorporeal hereditament. It could be bought and sold and inherited like an advowson, or right to dispose of a cure of souls in the English Church, or of a commission in the English army. The system was well recognized and widespread in the eighteenth century, and worked fairly well with the French judiciary for about three hundred years, but it was not adapted to an industrial environment. The judicial career came to be pretty strongly hereditary in a few families, and though the members of these families were, on the whole, self-respecting, honest, and learned, they held office in their own right and not as a public trust. So in England members of the House of Commons, who sat for nomination boroughs, did not, either in fact or theory, represent the inhabitants of those boroughs, but patrons; and in like manner French judges could never learn to regard themselves as the trustees of the civil rights of a nation, but as a component part of a class who held a status by private title. Looked at as a problem in dynamics the inherent vice in all this kind of property and in all this administrative system, was the decay, after 1760, of the physical force which had engendered it and defended it. As in England the ascendancy of the landlords passed away when England turned from an agricultural into an industrial society, so in France priests and nobles fell into contempt, when most peasants knew that the Church could neither harm by its curse nor aid by its blessing, and when commissions in the army were given to children or favorites, as a sort of pension, while the pith of the nation was excluded from military command because it could not prove four quarterings of nobility. Hardly an aristocrat in France had shown military talent for a generation, while, when the revolution began, men like Jourdan and Kleber, Ney and Augereau, and a host of other future marshals and generals had been dismissed from the army, or were eating out their hearts as petty officers with no hope of advancement. Local privileges and inequalities were as intolerable as personal. There were privileged provinces and those administered arbitrarily by the Crown, there were a multiplicity of internal tariffs, and endless municipal franchises and monopolies, so much so that economists estimated that, through artificial restraints, one-quarter of the soil of France lay waste. Turgot, in his edict on the grain trade, explained that kings in the past by ordinance, or the police without royal authority, had compiled a body "of legislation equivalent to a prohibition of bringing grain into Paris," and this condition was universal. One province might be starving and another oppressed with abundance.
Meanwhile, under the stimulant of applied science, centralization went on resistlessly, and the cost of administration is proportionate to centralization. To bear the burden of a centralized government taxes must be equal and movement free, but here was a rapidly centralizing nation, the essence of whose organism was that taxes should be unequal and that movement should be restricted.
As the third quarter of the eighteenth century closed with the death of Louis XV, all intelligent French administrators recognized the dilemma; either relief must be given, or France must become insolvent, and revolution supervene upon insolvency. But for the aristocracy revolution had no terrors, for they believed that they could crush revolution as their class had done for a thousand years.
Robert Turgot was born in 1727, of a respectable family. His father educated him for the Church, but lack of faith caused him to prefer the magistracy, and on the death of his father he obtained a small place in the Court of Parliament. Afterward he became a Master of Requests, and served for seven years in that judicial position, before he was made Intendant of the Province of Limousin. Even thus early in life Turgot showed political sagacity. In an address at the Sorbonne he supported the thesis that "well-timed reform alone averts revolution." Distinguishing himself as Intendant, on the death of Louis XV the King called Turgot to the Council of State, and in August, 1774, Turgot became Minister of Finance. He came in pledged to reform, and by January, 1776, he had formulated his plan. In that month he presented to the King his memorable Six Edicts, the first of which was the most celebrated state paper he ever wrote. It was the Edict for the Suppression of the Corvée. The corvée threw the burden of maintaining the highways on the peasantry by exacting forced labor. It was admittedly the most hateful, the most burdensome, and the most wasteful of all the bad taxes of the time, and Turgot, following the precedent of the Roman Empire, advised instead a general highway impost. The proposed impost in itself was not considerable, and would not have been extraordinarily obnoxious to the privileged classes, but for the principle of equality by which Turgot justified it: "The expenses of government having for their object the interests of all, all should contribute to them; and the more advantages a man has, the more that man should contribute."
Nor was this the most levelling of Turgot's arguments. He pointed out that though originally the exemption from taxation, which the nobility enjoyed, might have been defended on the ground that the nobles were bound to yield military service without pay, such service had long ceased to be performed, while on the contrary titles could be bought for money. Hence every wealthy man became a noble when he pleased, and thus exemption from taxation had come to present the line of cleavage between the rich and poor. By this thrust the privileged classes felt themselves wounded in their vitals, and the Parliament of Paris, the essence of privilege, assumed their defence. To be binding, the edicts had to be registered by the Parliament among the laws of France, and Parliament declined to make registration on the ground that the edicts were unconstitutional, as subversive of the monarchy and of the principle of order. The opinion of the court was long, but a single paragraph gives its purport: "The first rule of justice is to preserve to every one what belongs to him: this rule consists, not only in preserving the rights of property, but still more in preserving those belonging to the person, which arise from the prerogative of birth and of position.... From this rule of law and equity it follows that every system which, under an appearance of humanity and beneficence, would tend to establish between men an equality of duties, and to destroy necessary distinctions, would soon lead to disorder (the inevitable result of equality), and would bring about the overturn of civil society."
This judicial opinion was an enunciation of the archaic law of caste as opposed to the modern law of equality, and the cataclysm of the French Revolution hinged upon the incapacity of the French aristocracy to understand that the environment, which had once made caste a necessity, had yielded to another which made caste an impossibility. In vain Turgot and his contemporaries of the industrial type, represented in England by Adam Smith or even by the younger Pitt, explained that unless taxes were equalized and movement accelerated, insolvency must supervene, and that a violent readjustment must follow upon insolvency. With their eyes open to the consequences, the Nobility and Clergy elected to risk revolt, because they did not believe that revolt could prevail against them. Nothing is so impressive in the mighty convulsion which ensued as the mental opacity of the privileged orders, which caused them to increase their pressure in proportion as resistance increased, until finally those who were destined to replace them reorganized the courts, that they might have an instrument wherewith to slaughter a whole race down to the women and children. No less drastic method would serve to temper the rigidity of the aristocratic mind. The phenomenon well repays an hour of study.
Insolvency came within a decade after Turgot's fall, as Turgot had demonstrated that it must come, and an insolvency immediately precipitated by the rapacity of the court which had most need of caution. The future Louis XVIII, for example, who was then known as the Comte de Provence, on one occasion, when the government had made a loan, appropriated a quarter of it, laughingly observing, "When I see others hold out their hands, I hold out my hat." In 1787 the need for money became imperative, and, not daring to appeal to the nation, the King convoked an assembly of "notables," that is to say of the privileged. Calonne, the minister, proposed pretty much the measures of Turgot, and some of these measures the "notables" accepted, but the Parliament of Paris again intervened and declined to register the laws. The Provincial Parliaments followed the Parliament of Paris. After this the King had no alternative but to try the experiment of calling the States-General. They met on May 4, 1789, and instantly an administrative system, which no longer rested upon a social centre of gravity, crumbled, carrying the judiciary with it. At first the three estates sat separately. If this usage had continued, the Clergy and the Nobles combined would have annulled every measure voted by the Commons. For six weeks the Commons waited. Then on June 10, the Abbé Sieyès said, "Let us cut the cable. It is time." So the Clergy and the Nobility were summoned, and some of the Clergy obeyed. This sufficed. On motion of Sieyès, the Commons proclaimed themselves the National Assembly, and the orders fused. Immediately caste admitted defeat and through its mouthpiece, the King, commanded the Assembly to dissolve. The Commons refused to dissolve, and the Nobles prepared for acoup d'etat.The foreign regiments, in the pay of the government, were stationed about Paris, while the Bastille, which was supposed to be impregnable, was garrisoned with Swiss. In reply, on July 14, 1789, the citizens of Paris stormed the Bastille. An unstable social equilibrium had been already converted by pressure into a revolution. Nevertheless, excentric as the centre of gravity had now become, it might have been measurably readjusted had the privileged classes been able to reason correctly from premise to conclusion. Men like Lafayette and Mirabeau still controlled the Assembly, and if the King and the Nobility had made terms, probably the monarchy might have been saved, certainly the massacres would have been averted. As a decaying class is apt to do, the Nobility did that which was worst for themselves. Becoming at length partly conscious of a lack of physical force in France to crush the revolution, a portion of the nobility, led by the Comte d'Artois, the future Charles X, fled to Germany to seek for help abroad, while the bolder remained to plan an attack on the rebellion. On October 1, 1789, a great military banquet was given at Versailles. The King and Queen with the Dauphin were present. A royalist demonstration began. The bugles sounded a charge, the officers drew their swords, and the ladies of the court tore the tricolor from the soldiers' coats and replaced it with the white cockade. On October 5, a vast multitude poured out of Paris, and marched to Versailles. The next day they broke into the palace, killed the guards, and carried the King and Queen captive to the Tuileries. But Louis was so intellectually limited that he could not keep faith with those who wished him well. On July 14, 1790, the King swore, before half a million spectators, to maintain the new constitution. In that summer he was plotting to escape to Metz and join the army which had been collected there under the Marquis de Bouillé, while Bouillé himself, after the rising at Nancy, was busy in improving discipline by breaking on the wheel a selection of the soldiers of the Swiss regiment of Châteauvieux which had refused to march against Paris on the 14th of July, 1789. In October, 1790, Louis wrote to the King of Spain and other sovereigns to pay no heed to his concessions for he only yielded to duress, and all this even as Mirabeau made his supreme effort to save those who were fixed upon destroying themselves. Mirabeau sought the King and offered his services. The court sneered at him as a dupe. The Queen wrote, "We make use of Mirabeau, but we do not take him seriously." When Mirabeau awoke to his predicament, he broke out in mixed wrath and scorn: "Of what are these people thinking? Do they not see the abyss yawning at their feet? Both the King and Queen will perish, and you will live to see the rabble spurn their corpses."
The King and Queen, the Nobility and Clergy, could not see the abyss which Mirabeau saw, any more than the lawyers could see it, because of the temper of their minds. In the eye of caste Europe was not primarily divided into nations to whom allegiance was due, but into superimposed orders. He who betrayed his order committed the unpardonable crime. Death were better than that. But to the true aristocrat it was inconceivable that serfs could ever vanquish nobles in battle. Battle must be the final test, and the whole aristocracy of Europe was certain, Frenchmen knew, to succor the French aristocracy in distress.
So in the winter of 1790 the French fugitives congregated at Coblentz on the German frontier, persuaded that they were performing a patriotic duty in organizing an invasion of their country even should their onset be fatal to their relatives and to their King. And Louis doubted not that he also did his duty as a trustee of a divine commission when he in one month swore, before the Assembly, to maintain the constitution tendered him, and in the next authorized his brother, the Comte d'Artois, to make the best combination he could among his brother sovereigns for the gathering of an army to assert his divine prerogative. On June 21, 1791, Louis fled, with his whole family, to join the army of Bouillé, with intent to destroy the entire race of traitors from Mirabeau and Lafayette down to the peasants. He managed so ill that he was arrested at Varennes, and brought back whence he came, but he lied and plotted still.
Two years had elapsed between the meeting of the States-General and the flight to Varennes, and in that interval nature had been busy in selecting her new favored class. Economists have estimated that the Church owned one-third of the land of Europe during the Middle Ages. However this may have been she certainly held a very large part of France. On April 16, 1790, the Assembly declared this territory to be national property, and proceeded to sell it to the peasantry by means of the paperassignatswhich were issued for the purpose, and were supposed to be secured upon the land. The sales were generally made in little lots, as the sales were made of the public domain in Rome under the Licinian Laws, and with an identical effect. The Emperor of Germany and the King of Prussia met at Pilnitz in August, 1791, to consider the conquest of France, and, on the eve of that meeting, the Assembly received a report which stated that these lands to the value of a thousand million francs had already been distributed, and that sales were going on. It was from this breed of liberated husbandmen that France drew the soldiers who fought her battles and won her victories for the next five and twenty years.
Assuming that the type of the small French landholder, both rural and urban, had been pretty well developed by the autumn of 1791, the crisis came rapidly, for the confiscations which created this new energy roused to frenzy, perhaps the most formidable energy which opposed it. The Church had not only been robbed of her property but had been wounded in her tenderest part. By a decree of June 12, 1790, the Assembly transferred the allegiance of the French clergy from the Pope to the state, and the priesthood everywhere vowed revenge. In May, 1791, the Marquis de la Rouërie, it is true, journeyed from his home in Brittany to Germany to obtain the recognition of the royal princes for the insurrection which he contemplated in La Vendée, but the insurrection when it occurred was not due so much to him or his kind as to the influence of the nonjuring priests upon the peasant women of the West.
The mental condition of the French emigrants at Coblentz during this summer of 1791 is nothing short of a psychological marvel. They regarded the Revolution as a jest, and the flight to the Rhine as a picnic. These beggared aristocrats, male and female, would throw their money away by day among the wondering natives, and gamble among themselves at night. If they ever thought of the future it was only as the patricians in Pompey's camp thought; who had no time to prepare for a campaign against Caesar, because they were absorbed in distributing offices among themselves, or in inventing torments to inflict on the rebels. Their chief anxiety was lest the resistance should be too feeble to permit them to glut themselves with blood. The creatures of caste, the emigrants could not conceive of man as a variable animal, or of the birth of a race of warriors under their eyes. To them human nature remained constant. Such, they believed, was the immutable will of God.
So it came to pass that, as the Revolution took its shape, a vast combination among the antique species came semi-automatically into existence, pledged to envelop and strangle the rising type of man, a combination, however, which only attained to maturity in 1793, after the execution of the King. Leopold II, Emperor of Germany, had hitherto been the chief restraining influence, both at Pilnitz and at Paris, through his correspondence with his sister, Marie Antoinette; but Leopold died on March 1, 1792, and was succeeded by Francis II, a fervid reactionist and an obedient son of the Church. Then caste fused throughout Germany, and Prussia and Austria prepared for war. Rouërie had returned to Brittany and only awaited the first decisive foreign success to stab the Revolution in the back. England also was ripening, and the instinct of caste, incarnated in George III, found its expression through Edmund Burke. In 1790 Burke published his "Reflections," and on May 6, 1791, in a passionate outbreak in the House of Commons, he renounced his friendship with Fox as a traitor to his order and his God. Men of Burke's temperament appreciated intuitively that there could be no peace between the rising civilization and the old, one of the two must destroy the other, and very few of them conceived it to be possible that the enfranchised French peasantry and the small bourgeoisie could endure the shock of all that, in their eyes, was intelligent, sacred, and martial in the world.
Indeed, aristocracy had, perhaps, some justification for arrogance, since the revolt in France fell to its lowest depth of impotence between the meeting at Pilnitz in August, 1791, and the reorganization of the Committee of Public Safety in July, 1793. Until August, 1792, the executive authority remained with the King, but the court of Louis was the focus of resistance to the Revolution, and even though a quasi-prisoner the King was still strong. Monarchy had a firm hold on liberal nobles like Mirabeau and Lafayette, on adventurers like Dumouriez, and even on lawyers like Danton who shrank from excessive cruelty. Had the pure Royalists been capable of enough intellectual flexibility to keep faith upon any reasonable basis of compromise, even as late as 1792, the Revolution might have been benign. In June, 1792, Lafayette, who commanded the army of the North, came to Paris and not only ventured to lecture the Assembly on its duty, but offered to take Louis to his army, who would protect him against the Jacobins. The court laughed at Lafayette as a Don Quixote, and betrayed his plans to the enemy. "I had rather perish," said the Queen, "than be saved by M. de Lafayette and his constitutional friends." And in this she only expressed the conviction which the caste to which she belonged held of their duty. Cazalés protested to the Assembly, "Though the King perish, let us save the kingdom." The Archduchess Christina wrote to her sister, Marie Antoinette, "What though he be slain, if we shall triumph," and Condé, in December, 1790, swore that he would march on Lyons, "come what might to the King."
France was permeated with archaic thought which disorganized the emerging society until it seemingly had no cohesion. To the French emigrant on the Rhine that society appeared like a vile phantom which had but to be exorcised to vanish. And the exorcism to which he had recourse was threats of vengeance, threats which before had terrified, because they had behind them a force which made them good. Torture had been an integral part of the old law. The peasant expected it were he insubordinate. Death alone was held to be too little to inspire respect for caste. Some frightful spectacle was usually provided to magnify authority. Thus Bouillé broke on the wheel, while the men were yet alive, every bone in the bodies of his soldiers when they disobeyed him; and for scratching Louis XV, with a knife, Damiens, after indescribable agonies, was torn asunder by horses in Paris, before an immense multitude. The French emigrants believed that they had only to threaten with a similar fate men like Kellermann and Hoche to make them flee without a blow. What chiefly concerned the nobles, therefore, was not to evolve a masterly campaign, but to propound the fundamental principles of monarchy, and to denounce an awful retribution on insurgents.
By the middle of July, 1792, the Prussians were ready to march, and emperors, kings, and generals were meditating manifestoes. Louis sent the journalist Mallet du Pan to the Duke of Brunswick, the commander-in-chief, to assist him in his task. On July 24, and on August 4, 1792, the King of Prussia laid down the law of caste as emphatically as had the Parliament of Paris some twenty years before. On July 25, the Duke of Brunswick pronounced the doom of the conquered. I come, said the King of Prussia, to prevent the incurable evils which will result to France, to Europe and to all mankind from the spread of the spirit of insubordination, and to this end I shall establish the monarchical power upon a stable basis. For, he continued in the later proclamation, "the supreme authority in France being never ceasing and indivisible, the King could neither be deprived nor voluntarily divest himself of any of the prerogatives of royalty, because he is obliged to transmit them entire with his own crown to his successors."
The Duke of Brunswick's proclamation contained some clauses written expressly for him by Mallet du Pan, and by Limon the Royalist.
If the Palace of the Tuileries be forced, if the least violence be offered to their Majesties, if they are not immediately set at liberty, then will the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Germany inflict "on those who shall deserve it the most exemplary and ever-memorable avenging punishments."
These proclamations reached Paris on July 28, and simultaneously the notorious Fersen wrote the Queen of France, "You have the manifesto, and you should be content." The court actually believed that, having insulted and betrayed Lafayette and all that body of conservative opinion which might have steadied the social equilibrium, they could rely on the fidelity of regiments filled with men against whom the emigrants and their allies, the Prussians, had just denounced an agonizing death, such as Bouillé's soldiers had undergone, together with the destruction of their homes.
All the world knows what followed. The Royalists had been gathering a garrison for the Tuileries ever since Lafayette's visit, in anticipation of a trial of strength with the Revolutionists. They had brought thither the Swiss guard, fifteen hundred strong; the palace was full of Royalist gentlemen; Mandat, who commanded the National Guard, had been gained over. The approaches were swept by artillery. The court was very confident. On the night of August 9, Mandat was murdered, an insurrectional committee seized the City Hall, and when Louis XVI came forth to review the troops on the morning of the 10th of August, they shouted, "Vive la Nation" and deserted. Then the assault came, the Swiss guard was massacred, the Assembly thrust aside, and the royal family were seized and conveyed to the Temple. There the monarchy ended. Thus far had the irrational opposition of a moribund type thrown into excentricity the social equilibrium of a naturally conservative people. They were destined to drive it still farther.
In this supreme moment, while the Prussians were advancing, France had no stable government and very imperfect means of keeping order. All the fighting men she could muster had marched to the frontier, and, even so, only a demoralized mass of levies, under Dumouriez and Kellermann, lay between the most redoutable regiments of the world and Paris. The emigrants and the Germans thought the invasion but a military promenade. At home treason to the government hardly cared to hide itself. During much of August the streets of Paris swarmed with Royalists who cursed the Revolution, and with priests more bitter than the Royalists. Under the windows of Louis, as he lay in the Temple, there were cries of "Long live the King," and in the prisons themselves the nobles drank to the allies and corresponded with the Prussians. Finally, Roland, who was minister, so far lost courage that he proposed to withdraw beyond the Loire, but Danton would hear of no retreat. "De l'audace," he cried, "encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace."
The Assembly had not been responsible for the assault on the Tuileries on August 10, 1792. Filled with conservatives, it lacked the energy. That movement had been the work of a knot of radicals which had its centre in Danton's Club of the Cordeliers. Under their impulsion the sections of Paris chose commissioners who should take possession of the City Hall and eject the loyalist Council. They did so, and thus Danton became for a season the Minister of Justice and the foremost man in France. Danton was a semi-conservative. His tenure of power was the last possibility of averting the Terror. The Royalists, whom he trusted, themselves betrayed him, and Danton fell, to be succeeded by Robespierre and his political criminal courts. Meanwhile, on September 20, 1792, the Prussian column recoiled before the fire of Kellermann's mob of "vagabonds, cobblers and tailors," on the slope of Valmy, and with the victory of Valmy, the great eighteenth-century readjustment of the social equilibrium of Europe passed into its secondary stage.
POLITICAL COURTS
In the eye of philosophy, perhaps the most alluring and yet illusive of all the phenomena presented by civilization is that which we have been considering. Why should a type of mind which has developed the highest prescience when advancing along the curve which has led it to ascendancy, be stricken with fatuity when the summit of the curve is passed, and when a miscalculation touching the velocity of the descent must be destruction?
Although this phenomenon has appeared pretty regularly, at certain intervals, in the development of every modern nation, I conceive its most illuminating example to be that intellectual limitation of caste which, during the French Revolution, led to the creation of those political criminal tribunals which reached perfection with Robespierre.
When coolly examined, at the distance of a century, the Royalist combination for the suppression of equality before the law, as finally evolved in 1792, did not so much lack military intelligence, as it lacked any approximate comprehension of the modern mind. The Royalists proposed to reëstablish privilege, and to do this they were ready to immolate, if necessary, their King and Queen, and all of their own order who stayed at home to defend them. Indeed, speaking generally, they valued Louis XVI, living, cheaply enough, counting him a more considerable asset if dead. "What a noise it would make throughout Europe," they whispered among themselves, "if the rabble should kill the King."
Nor did Marie Antoinette delude herself on this score. At Pilnitz, in 1791, the German potentates issued a declaration touching France which was too moderate to suit the emigrants, who published upon it a commentary of their own. This commentary was so revolting that when the Queen read her brother-in-law's signature appended to it, she exclaimed--"Cain."
The Royalist plan of campaign was this: They reckoned the energy of the Revolution so low that they counted pretty confidently, in the summer of 1792, on the ability of their party to defend the Tuileries against any force which could be brought against it; but assuming that the Tuileries could not be defended, and that the King and Queen should be massacred, they believed that their own position would be improved. Their monarchical allies would be thereby violently stimulated. It was determined, therefore, that, regardless of consequences to their friends, the invading army should cross the border into Lorraine and, marching by way of Sierk and Rodemach, occupy Châlons. Their entry into Châlons, which they were confident could not be held against them, because of the feeling throughout the country, was to be the signal for the rising in Vendée and Brittany which should sweep down upon Paris from the rear and make the capital untenable. At Châlons the allies would be but ninety miles from Paris, and then nothing would remain but vengeance, and vengeance the more complete the greater the crime had been.
All went well with them up to Valmy. The German advance on August 11, 1792, reached Rodemach, and on August 19, the bulk of the Prussian army crossed the frontier at Rédagne. On August 20, 1792, Longwy was invested and in three days capitulated. In the camp of the Comte d'Artois "there was not one of us," wrote Las Casas, "who did not see himself, in a fortnight, triumphant, in his own home, surrounded by his humbled and submissive vassals." At length from their bivouacs at Saint-Remy and at Suippes the nobles saw in the distance the towers of Châlons.
The panic at Châlons was so great that orders were given to cut the bridge across the Marne, but it was not until about September 2, that the whole peril was understood at Paris. It is true that for several weeks the government had been aware that the West was agitated and that Rouërie was probably conspiring among the Royalists and nonjuring priests, but they did not appreciate the imminence of the danger. On September 3, at latest, Danton certainly heard the details of the plot from a spy, and it was then, while others quailed, that he incited Paris to audacity. This was Danton's culmination.
As we look back, the weakness of the Germans seems to have been psychological rather than physical. At Valmy the numbers engaged were not unequal, and while the French were, for the most part, raw and ill-compacted levies, with few trained officers, the German regiments were those renowned battalions of Frederick the Great whose onset, during the Seven Years' War, no adversary had been able to endure. Yet these redoubtable Prussians fell back in confusion without having seriously tried the French position, and their officers, apparently, did not venture to call upon them to charge again. In vain the French gentlemen implored the Prussian King to support them if they alone should storm Kellermann's batteries. Under the advice of the Duke of Brunswick the King decided on retreat. It is said that the Duke had as little heart in the war as Charles Fox, or, possibly, Pitt, or as his own troops. And yet he was so strong that Dumouriez, after his victory, hung back and offered the invaders free passage lest the Germans, if aroused, should turn on him and fight their way to the Marne.
To the emigrants the retreat was terrible. It was a disaster from which, as a compact power, they never recovered. The rising in Vendée temporarily collapsed with the check at Châlons, and they were left literally naked unto their enemy. Some of them returned to their homes, preferring the guillotine to starvation, others, disguised in peasants' blouses, tried to reach Rouërie in La Vendée, some died from hardship, some committed suicide, while the bulk regained Liège and there waited as suppliants for assistance from Vienna. But these unfortunate men, who had entered so gayly upon a conflict whose significance they could not comprehend, had by this time lost more than lands and castles. Many of them had lost wives and children in one of the most frightful butcheries of history, and a butchery for which they themselves were responsible, because it was the inevitable and logical effect of their own intellectual limitations.
When, after the affair of August 10, Danton and his party became masters of the incipient republic, Paris lay between two perils whose relative magnitude no one could measure. If Châlons fell, Vendée would rise, and the Republicans of the West would be massacred. Five months later Vendée did rise, and at Machecoul the patriots were slaughtered amidst nameless atrocities, largely at the instigation of the priests. In March, 1793, one hundred thousand peasants were under arms.
Clearly the West could not be denuded of troops, and yet, if Châlons were to be made good, every available man had to be hurried to Kellermann, and this gigantic effort fell to the lot of a body of young and inexperienced adventurers who formed what could hardly be dignified with the name of an organized administration.
For a long time Marat, with whom Danton had been obliged to coalesce, had been insisting that, if the enemy were to be resisted on the frontier, Paris must first be purged, for Paris swarmed with Royalists wild for revenge, and who were known to be arming. Danton was not yet prepared for extermination. He instituted domiciliary visits. He made about three thousand arrests and seized a quantity of muskets, but he liberated most of those who were under suspicion. The crisis only came with the news, on September 2, of the investment of Verdun, when no one longer could doubt that the net was closing about Paris. Verdun was but three or four days' march from Châlons. When the Duke of Brunswick crossed the Marne and Brittany revolted, the government would have to flee, as Roland proposed, and then the Royalists would burst the gates of the prisons and there would be another Saint Bartholomew.
Toward four o'clock in the afternoon of September 2, 1792, the prison of the Abbaye was forced and the massacres began. They lasted until September 6, and through a circular sent out by Marat they were extended to Lyons, to Reims, and to other cities. About 1600 prisoners were murdered in Paris alone. Hardly any one has ever defended those slaughters. Even Marat called them "disastrous," and yet no one interfered. Neither Danton, nor Roland, nor the Assembly, nor the National Guard, nor the City of Paris, although the two or three hundred ruffians who did the work could have been dispersed by a single company of resolute men, had society so willed it. When Robespierre's time came he fell almost automatically. Though the head of the despotic "Committee of Public Safety," and nominally the most powerful man in France, he was sent to execution like the vilest and most contemptible of criminals by adversaries who would not command a regiment. The inference is that the September massacres, which have ever since been stigmatized as the deepest stain upon the Revolution, were, veritably, due to the Royalists, who made with the Republicans an issue of self-preservation. For this was no common war. In Royalist eyes it was a servile revolt, and was to be treated as servile revolts during the Middle Ages had always been treated. Again and again, with all solemnity, the Royalists had declared that were they to return as conquerors no stone of Paris should be left standing on another, and that the inhabitants should expire in the ashes of their homes on the rack and the wheel.
Though Danton had many and obvious weaknesses he was a good lawyer, and Danton perceived that though he might not have been able to prevent the September massacres, and although they might have been and probably were inevitable under the tension which prevailed, yet that any court, even a political court, would be better than Marat's mob. Some months later he explained his position to the Convention when it was considering the erection of the tribunal which finally sent Danton himself to the scaffold. "Nothing is more difficult than to define a political crime. But, if a simple citizen, for any ordinary crime, receives immediate punishment, if it is so difficult to reach a political crime, is it not necessary that extraordinary laws ... intimidate the rebels and reach the culpable? Here public safety requires strong remedies and terrible measures. I see no compromise between ordinary forms and a revolutionary tribunal. History attests this truth; and since members have dared in this assembly to refer to those bloody days which every good citizen has lamented, I say that, if such a tribunal had then existed, the people who have been so often and so cruelly reproached for them, would never have stained them with blood; I say, and I shall have the assent of all who have watched these movements, that no human power could have checked the outburst of the national vengeance."
In this perversion of the courts lay, as I understand it, the foulest horror of the French Revolution. It was the effect of the rigidity of privilege, a rigidity which found its incarnation in the judiciary. The constitutional decisions of the parliaments under the old régime would alone have made their continuance impossible, but the worst evil was that, after the shell crumbled, the mind within the shell survived, and discredited the whole regular administration of justice. When the National Assembly came to examine grievances it found protests against the judicial system from every corner of France, and it referred these petitions to a committee which reported in August, 1789. Setting aside the centralization and consolidation of the system as being, for us, immaterial, the committee laid down four leading principles of reform. First, purchase of place should be abolished, and judicial office should be recognized as a public trust. Second, judges should be confined to applying, and restrained from interpreting, the law. That is to say, the judges should be forbidden to legislate. Third, the judges should be brought into harmony with public opinion by permitting the people to participate in their appointment. Fourth, the tendency toward rigor in criminal cases, which had become a scandal under the old régime, should be tempered by the introduction of the jury. Bergasse proposed that judicial appointments should be made by the executive from among three candidates selected by the provincial assemblies. After long and very remarkable debates the plan was, in substance, adopted in May, 1790, except that the Assembly decided, by a majority of 503 to 450, that the judges should be elected by the people for a term of six years, without executive interference. In the debate Cazalès represented the conservatives, Mirabeau the liberals. The vote was a test vote and shows how strong the conservatives were in the Assembly up to the reorganization of the Clergy in July, 1790, and the electoral assemblies of the districts, which selected the judges, seem, on the whole, to have been rather more conservative than the Assembly. In the election not a sixth of those who were enfranchised voted for the delegates who, in turn, chose the judges, and these delegates were usually either eminent lawyers themselves, or wealthy merchants, or men of letters. The result was a bench not differing much from an old parliament, and equally incapable of understanding the convulsion about them.
Installed early in 1791, not a year elapsed before these magistrates became as ill at ease as had been those whom they displaced, and in March, 1792, Jean Debry formally demanded their recall, although their terms properly were to expire in 1796. During the summer of 1792 they sank into contempt and, after the massacres, the Legislative Assembly, just before its dissolution, provided for a new constituency for the judicial elections. This they degraded so far that, out of fifty-one magistrates to be chosen in Paris, only twelve were professionally trained. Nor did the new courts inspire respect. After the 10th of August one or two special tribunals were organized to try the Swiss Guard who surrendered in the Palace, and other political offenders, but these proved to be so ineffective that Marat thrust them aside, and substituted for them his gangs of murderers. No true and permanent political court was evolved before Danton had to deal with the treason of Dumouriez, nor was this tribunal perfected before Danton gave way to the Committee of Public Safety, when French revolutionary society became incandescent, through universal attack from without and through insurrection within.
Danton, though an orator and a lawyer, possibly even a statesman, was not competent to cope with an emergency which exacted from a minister administrative genius like that of Carnot. Danton's story may be briefly told. At once after Valmy the Convention established the Republic; on January 21, 1793, Louis was beheaded; and between these two events a new movement had occurred. The Revolutionists felt intuitively that, if they remained shut up at home, with enemies without and traitors within, they would be lost. If the new ideas were sound they would spread, and Valmy had proved to them that those ideas had already weakened the invading armies. Danton declared for the natural boundaries of France,--the Rhine, the Alps, and the ocean,--and the Convention, on January 29, 1793, threw Dumouriez on Holland. This provoked war with England, and then north, south, and east the coalition was complete. It represented at least half a million fighting men. Danton, having no military knowledge or experience, fixed his hopes on Dumouriez. To Danton, Dumouriez was the only man who could save France. On November 6, 1792, Dumouriez defeated the Austrians at Jemmapes; on the 14th, he entered Brussels, and Belgium lay helpless before him. On the question of the treatment of Belgium, the schism began which ended with his desertion. Dumouriez was a conservative who plotted for a royal restoration under, perhaps, Louis Philippe. The Convention, on the contrary, determined to revolutionize Belgium, as France had been revolutionized, and to this end Cambon proposed to confiscate and sell church land and emit assignats. Danton visited Dumouriez to attempt to pacify him, but found him deeply exasperated. Had Danton been more sagacious he would have been suspicious. Unfortunately for him he left Dumouriez in command. In February, Dumouriez invaded Holland and was repulsed, and he then fell back to Brussels, not strong enough to march to Paris without support, it is true, but probably expecting to be strong enough as soon as the Vendean insurrection came to a head. Doubtless he had relations with the rebels. At all events, on March 10, the insurrection began with the massacre of Machecoul, and on March 12, 1793, Dumouriez wrote a letter to the Convention which was equivalent to a declaration of war. He then tried to corrupt his army, but failed, and on April 4, 1793, fled to the Austrians. Meanwhile, La Vendée was in flames. To appreciate the situation one must read Carnot's account of the border during these weeks when he alone, probably, averted some grave disaster. For my purpose it suffices to say that the pressure was intense, and that this intense pressure brought forth the Revolutionary Tribunal, or the political court.
On March 10, 1793, the Convention passed a decree constituting a court of five judges and a jury, to be elected by the Convention. To these was joined a public prosecutor. Fouquier-Tinville afterward attained to a sombre fame in this position. Six members of the Convention were to sit as a commission to supervise drawing the indictments, the preparation of evidence, and also to advise the prosecutor. The punishments, under the limitations of the Penal Code and other criminal laws, were to be within the discretion of the court, whose judgments were to be final.[40]Death was accompanied by confiscation of property.
Considering that this was an extraordinary tribunal, working under extreme tension, which tried persons against whom usually the evidence was pretty conclusive, its record for the first six months was not discreditable. Between April 6 and September 21, 1793, it rendered sixty-three sentences of death, thirteen of transportation, and thirty-eight acquittals. The trials were held patiently, testimony was heard, and the juries duly deliberated. Nevertheless the Terror deepened as the stress upon the new-born republic increased. Nothing more awful can be imagined than the ordeal which France endured between the meeting of the Convention in September, 1792, and the completion of the Committee of Public Safety in August, 1793. Hemmed in by enemies, the revolution glowed in Paris like molten lava, while yet it was torn by faction. Conservative opinion was represented by the Girondists, radical opinion by the Mountain, and between the two lay the Plain, or the majority of the Convention, who embodied the social centre of gravity. As this central mass swayed, so did supremacy incline. The movement was as accurate as that of any scientific instrument for registering any strain. Dumouriez's treason in April left the northern frontier open, save for a few fortresses which still held out. When those should fall the enemy could make a junction with the rebels in Vendée. Still the Girondists kept control, and even elected Isnard, the most violent among them, President of the Convention. Then they had the temerity to arrest a member of the Commune of Paris, which was the focus of radicalism. That act precipitated the struggle for survival and with it came the change in equilibrium. On June 2, Paris heard of the revolt of Lyons and of the massacre of the patriots. The same day the Sections invaded the Convention and expelled from their seats in the Tuileries twenty-seven Girondists. The Plain or Centre now leant toward the Mountain, and, on July 10, the Committee of Public Safety, which had been first organized on April 6, 1793, directly after Dumouriez's treason, was reorganized by the addition of men like Saint-Just and Couthon, with Prieur, a lawyer of ability and energy, for President. On July 12, 1793, the Austrians took Condé, and on July 28, Valenciennes; while on July 25, Kleber, starving, surrendered Mayence. Nothing now but their own inertia stood between the allies and La Vendée. Thither indeed Kellermann's men were sent, since they had promised not to serve against the coalition for a year, but even of these a division was surrounded and cut to pieces in the disaster of Torfou. A most ferocious civil war soon raged throughout France. Caen, Bordeaux, Lyons, Marseilles, declared against the Convention. The whole of the northwest was drenched in blood by the Chouans. Sixty departments were in arms. On August 28 the Royalists surrendered Toulon to the English, who blockaded the coasts and supplied the needs of the rebels. About Paris the people were actually starving. On July 27 Robespierre entered the Committee of Safety; Carnot, on August 14. This famous committee was a council of ten forming a pure dictatorship. On August 16, the Convention decreed theLevée en Masse.
When Carnot became Minister of War to this dictatorship the Republic had 479,000 demoralized soldiers with the colors, under beaten and discredited commanders. Bouillé had conspired against the States-General, Lafayette against the Legislative Assembly, and Dumouriez against the Convention. One year from that time it had a superb force, 732,000 strong, commanded by Jourdan and Pichegru, Hoche, Moreau, and Bonaparte. Above all Carnot loved Hoche. Up to Valmy the old regular army, however shaken, had remained as a core. Then it became merged in a mass of volunteers, and these volunteers had to be armed and disciplined and fed and led against the greatest and strongest coalition which the modern world had ever seen. France, under Camot, became a vast workshop. Its most eminent scientific men taught the people how to gather saltpetre and the government how to manufacture powder and artillery. Horses had to be obtained. Carnot was as reckless of himself as of others. He knew no rest. There was that to be done which had to be done quickly and at any cost; there was that or annihilation.
On October 21, 1794, when the people had gathered in the Champ de Mars to celebrate the Festival of Victories, after the President of the Convention had proclaimed that the Republic had been delivered, Carnot announced what had been accomplished.
France had won twenty-seven victories, of which eight had been pitched battles.
One hundred and twenty lesser combats. France had killed eighty thousand enemies.
Had taken ninety-one thousand prisoners.
Also one hundred and sixteen places or towns, six after siege.
Two hundred and thirty forts or redoubts.
Three thousand eight hundred cannon.
Seventy thousand muskets.
Ninety flags.
As Benjamin Constant has observed, nothing can change the stupendous fact "that the Convention found the enemy at thirty leagues from Paris, ... and made peace at thirty leagues from Vienna."
Under the stimulus of a change in environment of mind is apt to expand with something of this resistless energy. It did so in the Reformation. It may be said almost invariably to do so, when decay does not supervene, and it now concerns us to consider, in some rough way, what the cost to the sinking class of attempting repression may be, when it miscalculates its power in such an emergency.
I take it to be tolerably clear that, if the French privileged classes had accepted the reforms of Turgot in good faith, and thus had spread the movement of the revolution over a generation, there would have been no civil war and no confiscations, save confiscations of ecclesiastical property. I take it also that there would have been no massacres and no revolutionary tribunals, if France in 1793 had fought foreign enemies alone, as England did in 1688. Even as it was the courts did not grow thoroughly political until the preservation of the new type of mind came to hinge largely on the extermination of the old. Danton's first and relatively benign revolutionary tribunal, established in March, 1793, was reorganized by the Committee of Public Safety in the following autumn, by a series of decrees of which the most celebrated is that of September 17, touching suspected persons. By these decrees the tribunal was enlarged so that, in the words of Danton, every day an aristocratic head might fall. The committee presented a list of judges, and the object of the law was to make the possession of a reactionary mind a capital offence. It is only in extreme exigencies that pure thinking by a single person becomes a crime. Ordinarily, a crime consists of a malicious thought coupled with an overt act, but in periods of high tension, the harboring of any given thought becomes criminal. Usually during civil wars test oaths are tendered to suspected persons to discover their loyalty. For several centuries the Church habitually burnt alive all those who denied the test dogma of transubstantiation, and during the worst spasm of the French Revolution to believe in the principle of monarchy and privilege was made capital with confiscation of property.
The question which the Convention had to meet was how to establish the existence of a criminal mind, when nothing tangible indicated it. The old régime had tortured. To prove heresy the Church also had always used torture. The Revolution proceeded more mildly. It acted on suspicion. The process was simple. The Committee, of whom in this department Robespierre was the chief, made lists of those who were to be condemned. There came to be finally almost a complete absence of forms. No evidence was necessarily heard. The accused, if inconvenient, was not allowed to speak. If there were doubt touching the probability of conviction, pressure was put upon the court. I give one or two examples: Scellier, the senior associate judge of the tribunal, appears to have been a good lawyer and a fairly worthy man. One day in February, 1794, Scellier was at dinner with Robespierre, when Robespierre complained of the delays of the court. Scellier replied that without the observance of forms there could be no safety for the innocent. "Bah!" replied Robespierre,--"you and your forms: wait; soon the Committee will obtain a law which will suppress forms, and then we shall see." Scellier ventured no answer. Such a law was drafted by Couthon and actually passed on 22 Prairial (June 10, 1794), and yet it altered little the methods of Fouquier-Tinville as prosecuting officer. Scellier having complained of this law of Prairial to Saint-Just, Saint-Just replied that if he were to report his words, or that he was flinching, to the Committee, Scellier would be arrested. As arrest was tantamount to sentence of death, Scellier continued his work.
Without reasoning the subject out logically from premise to conclusion, or being, of course, capable of doing so in the mass, Frenchmen had collectively received the intuition that everything must be endured for a strong government, and that whatever obstructed that government must be eliminated. For the process of elimination they used the courts. Under the conditions in which they were placed by the domestic enemy, they had little alternative. If a political party opposed the Dictatorship in the Convention, that party must be broken down; if a man seemed likely to become a rival for the Dictatorship, that man must be removed; all who conspired against the Republic must be destroyed as ruthlessly at home as on the battle-field. The Republic was insolvent, and must have money, as it must have men. If the government needed men, it took them,--all. If it needed money, and a man were rich, it did not hesitate to execute him and confiscate his property. There are very famous examples of all these phenomena strewn through the history of the Terror.
The Girondists were liberals. They always had been liberals; they had never conspired against the Republic; but they were impracticable. The ablest of them, Vergniaud, complained before the Tribunal, that he was being tried for what he thought, not for what he had done. This the government denied, but it was true. Nay, more; he was tried not for positive but for negative opinions, and he was convicted and executed, and his friends were convicted and executed with him, because, had they remained in the Convention, the Dictatorship, through their opposition, would have lost its energy. Also the form of the conviction was shocking in the extreme. The defence of these twenty-one men was, practically, suppressed, and the jury were directed to bring in a verdict of guilty. Still the prosecutions of the Girondists stopped here. When they refrained from obstruction, they were spared.
Danton and his friends may have been, and probably were, whether intentionally or by force of circumstances, a menace to the Dictatorship. Either Robespierre or Danton had to be eliminated. There was not room for both. On April 1, 1793, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and others were arrested on a warrant signed by such men as Cambacérès, Carnot, and Prieur. Carnot in particular was a soldier of the highest character and genius. He would have signed no such warrant had he not thought the emergency pressing. Nor was the risk small. Danton was so popular and so strong before a jury that the government appears to have distrusted even Fouquier-Tinville, for an order was given, and held in suspense, apparently to Henriot, to arrest the President and the Public Prosecutor of the Revolutionary Tribunal, on the day of Danton's trial.
Under such a stimulant Fouquier did his best, but he felt himself to be beaten. Examining Cambon, Danton broke out: "Do you believe us to be conspirators? Look, he laughs, he don't believe it. Record that he has laughed." Fouquier was at his wits' end. If the next day the jury were asked if they had heard enough, and they answered, "No," there would be an acquittal, and then Fouquier's own head would roll into the basket. Probably there might even be insurrection. Fouquier wrote to the Committee that they must obtain from the Convention a decree silencing the defence. So grave was the crisis felt to be that the decree was unanimously voted. When Fouquier heard that the decree was on its way, he said, with a sigh of relief,--"Faith, we need it." But when it was read, Danton sprung to his feet, raging, declaring that the public cried out treason upon it. The President adjourned the court while the hall resounded with the protests of the defendants and the shouts of the police as they tore the condemned from the benches which they clutched and dragged them through the corridors toward the prison. They emerged no more until they mounted the carts which took them to the scaffold.
Nor was it safe to hesitate if one were attached to this court. Fouquier had a clerk named Paris-Fabricius. Now Paris had been a friend of Danton and took his condemnation to heart. He even declined to sign the judgment, which it was his duty to do. The next day, when he presented himself to Fouquier, Fouquier looked at him sourly, and observed, "We don't want men who reason here; we want business done." The following morning Paris did not appear. His friends were disturbed, but he was not to be found. He had been cast into a secret dungeon in the prison of the Luxembourg.
So, if a man were too rich it might go hard with him. Louis-Philippe-Joseph, Duc d'Orleans, afterward known as Égalité, was one of the most interesting figures among the old nobility. The great-great-great-grandson of Louis XIII, he was a distant cousin of Louis XVI, and ranked as the first noble of France beyond the royal family. His education had been unfortunate. His father lived with a ballet-dancer, while his mother, the Princess Henriette de Bourbon-Conti, scandalized a society which was not easily shocked. During the Terror the sans culottes everywhere averred that the Duke was the son of a coachman in the service of the banker Duruet. Doubtless this was false, but the princess had abundant liaisons not much more reputable. Left to himself at sixteen years old, Égalité led a life of extreme profligacy, but he married one of the most beautiful and charming women of the age, whom he succeeded in inspiring with a devoted affection. Born in 1747, his father died in 1785, leaving him, just at the outbreak of the Revolution, the master of enormous wealth, and the father of three sons who adored him. The eldest of these was the future king, Louis-Philippe. The man must have had good in him to have been loved as he was throughout life. He was besides more intelligent touching the Revolution and its meaning than any man approaching him in rank in France. The Duke, when a young man, served with credit in the navy, but after the battle of Ushant, in 1778, where he commanded the blue squadron, he was received with such enthusiasm in Paris, that Marie-Antoinette obtained his dismissal from the service. From this period he withdrew from court and his opposition to the government began. He adopted republican ideas, which he drew from America, and he educated his children as democrats. In 1789 he was elected to the States-General, where he supported the fusion of the orders, and attained to a popularity which, on one occasion, according to Madame de Campan, nearly made the Queen faint from rage and grief. It was from the garden of his palace of the Palais Royal that the column marched on July 14, wearing his colors, the red, white and blue, to storm the Bastille. It seemed that he had only to go on resolutely to thrust the King aside and become the ruler of France. He made no effort to do so. Mirabeau is said to have been disgusted with his lack of ambition. He was charitable also, and spent very large sums of money among the poor of Paris during the years of distress which followed upon the social disorders. The breach with the court, however, became steadily wider, and finally he adhered to the party of Danton and voted for the condemnation of the King. He sent two of his sons to serve in the army. The elder was still with Dumouriez at the time of his treason. On April 6, 1793, when Dumouriez's treachery had become known, the Assembly ordered the arrest of the whole Bourbon family, and among them the Duke was apprehended and sent to Marseilles.
Thus it appears that whatever complaint his own order may have had against Égalité, the Republic certainly had none. No man could have done more for modern France than he. He abandoned his class, renounced his name, gave his money, sent his sons to the war, and voted for his own relative's death. No one feared him, and yet Robespierre had him brought to Paris and guillotined. His trial was a form. Fouquier admitted that he had been condemned before he left Marseilles. The Duke was, however, very rich and the government needed his money. Every one understood the situation. He was told of the order for his arrest one night when at supper in his palace in Paris with his friend Monsieur de Monville. The Duke, much moved, asked Monville if it were not horrible, after all the sacrifices he had made and all that he had done. "Yes, horrible," said Monville, coolly, "but what would you have? They have taken from your Highness all they could get, you can be of no further use to them. Therefore, they will do to you, what I do with this lemon" (he was squeezing a lemon on a sole); "now I have all the juice." And he threw the lemon into the fireplace. But yet even then Robespierre was not satisfied. He harbored malice against this fallen man. On the way to the scaffold he ordered the cart, in which the Duke sat, to stop before the Palais Royal, which had been confiscated, in order that the Duke might contemplate his last sacrifice for his country. The Duke showed neither fear nor emotion.
All the world knows the story of the Terror. The long processions of carts carrying victims to the guillotine, these increasing in number until after the Law of Prairial they averaged sixty or seventy a day in Paris alone, while in the provinces there was no end. At Nantes, Carrier could not work fast enough by a court, so he sank boat loads of prisoners in the Loire. The hecatombs sacrificed at Lyons, and the "Red Masses" of Orange, have all been described. The population of Toulon sank from 29,000 to 7,000. All those, in fine, were seized and slain who were suspected of having a mind tinged with caste, or of being traitors to the Republic. And it was the Centre, or the majority of the Convention, who did this, by tacitly permitting it to be done. That is to say, France permitted it because the onslaught of the decaying class made atrocities such as these appear to be a condition of self-preservation. I doubt if, in human history, there be such another and so awful an illustration of the possible effects of conservative errors of judgment.
For France never loved the Terror or the loathsome instruments, such as Fouquier-Tinville, or Carrier, or Billaud-Varennes, or Collot-d'Herbois, or Henriot, or Robespierre, or Couthon, who conducted it. On this point there can, I think, be neither doubt nor question. I have tried to show how the Terror began. It is easy to show how and why it ended. As it began automatically by the stress of foreign and domestic war, so it ended automatically when that stress was relieved. And the most curious aspect of the phenomenon is that it did not end through the application of force, but by common consent, and when it had ended, those who had been used for the bloody work could not be endured, and they too were put to death. The procession of dates is convincing.
When, on July 27, 1793, Robespierre entered the Committee of Public Safety, the fortunes of the Republic were near their nadir, but almost immediately, after Carnot took the War Department on August 14, they began to mend. On October 8, 1793, Lyons surrendered; on December 19, 1793, the English evacuated Toulon; and, on December 23, the insurrection in La Vendée received its death blow at Savenai. There had also been success on the frontiers. Carnot put Hoche in command in the Vosges. On December 23, 1793, Hoche defeated Wurmser at Freschweiller, when the Austrians, abandoning the lines of Wissembourg, fell back across the Rhine. Thus by the end of 1793, save for the great border fortresses of Valenciennes and Condé to the north, which commanded the road from Brussels to Paris, the soil of France had been cleared of the enemy, and something resembling domestic tranquillity had been restored at home. Simultaneously, as the pressure lessened, rifts began to appear in the knot of men who held the Dictatorship in the Republic. Robespierre, Couthon, and Saint-Just coalesced, and gained control of the police, while Billaud-Varennes, Collot-d'Herbois, and, secretly and as far as he dared, Barère, formed an opposition. Not that the latter were more moderate or merciful than Robespierre, but because, in the nature of things, there could be but one Dictator, and it became a question of the survival of the fittest. Carnot took little or no part in active politics. He devoted himself to the war, but he disapproved of the Terror and came to a breach with Saint-Just. Robespierre's power culminated on June 10, 1794, with the passage of the Law of 22 Prairial, which put the life of every Frenchman in his hand, and after which, save for some dozen or two of his most intimate and devoted adherents like Saint-Just, Couthon, Le Bas, Fouquier, Fleuriot the Mayor of Paris, and Henriot, the commander of the national guard, no one felt his head safe on his shoulders. It needed but security on the northern frontier to cause the social centre of gravity to shift and Robespierre to fall, and security came with the campaign of Fleurus.
Jourdan and Pichegru were in command on the Belgian border, and on June 26, 1794, just sixteen days after the passage of the Law of Prairial, Jourdan won the battle of Fleurus. This battle, though not decisive in itself, led to decisive results. It uncovered Valenciennes and Condé, which were invested, closing the entrance to France. On July 11, Jourdan entered Brussels; on July 16, he won a crushing victory before Louvain and the same day Namur opened its gates. On July 23, Pichegru, driving the English before him, seized Antwerp. No Frenchman could longer doubt that France was delivered, and with that certainty the Terror ended without a blow. Eventually the end must have come, but it came instantly, and, according to the old legend, it came through a man's love for a woman.
John Lambert Tallien, the son of the butler of the Marquis of Bercy, was born in 1769, and received an education through the generosity of the marquis, who noticed his intelligence. He became a journeyman printer, and one day in the studio of Madame Lebrun, dressed in his workman's blouse, he met Thérézia Cabarrus, Marquise de Fontenay, the most seductive woman of her time, and fell in love with her on the instant. Nothing, apparently, could have been more hopeless or absurd. But the Revolution came. Tallien became prominent, was elected to the Convention, grew to be influential, and in September, 1793, was sent to Bordeaux, as representative of the Chamber, or as proconsul, as they called it. There he, the all-powerful despot, found Thérézia, trying to escape to Spain, in prison, humble, poor, shuddering in the shadow of the guillotine. He saved her; he carried her through Bordeaux in triumph in a car by his side. He took her with him to Paris, and there Robespierre threw her into prison, and accused Tallien of corruption. On June 12 Robespierre denounced him to the Convention, and on June 14, 1794, the Jacobins struck his name from the list of the club. When Fleurus was fought Thérézia lay in La Force, daily expecting death, while Tallien had become the soul of the reactionary party. On the 8 Thermidor (July 26,1794) Tallien received a dagger wrapped in a note signed by Thérézia,--"To-morrow they kill me. Are you then only a coward?"[41]
On the morrow the great day had come. Saint-Just rose in the Convention to read a report to denounce Billaud, Collot, and Camot. Tallien would not let him be heard. Billaud followed him. Collot was in the chair. Robespierre mounted the tribune and tried to speak. It was not without reason that Thérézia afterwards said, "This little hand had somewhat to do with overthrowing the guillotine," for Tallien sprang on him, dagger in hand, and, grasping him by the throat, cast him from the tribune, exclaiming, "I have armed myself with a dagger to pierce his heart if the Convention dare not order his accusation." Then rose a great shout from the Centre, "Down with the tyrant, arrest him, accuse him!" From the Centre, which until that day had always silently supported the Robespierrian Dictatorship. Robespierre for the last time tried to speak, but his voice failed him. "It's Danton's blood that chokes him; arrest him, arrest him!" they shouted from the Right. Robespierre dropped exhausted on a bench, then they seized him, and his brother, and Couthon, and Saint-Just, and ordered that the police should take them to prison.
But it was one thing for the Convention to seize Robespierre singly, and within its own hall; it was quite another for it to hold him and send him to the guillotine. The whole physical force of Paris was nominally with Robespierre. The Mayor, Fleuriot, closed the barriers, sounded the tocsin, and forbade any jailer to receive the prisoners; while Henriot, who had already been drinking, mounted a horse and galloped forth to rouse the city. Fleuriot caused Robespierre, Couthon, and Le Bas to be brought to the City Hall. A provisional government was completed. It only remained to disperse the Assembly. Henriot undertook a duty which looked easy. He seems to have collected about twenty guns, which he brought to the Tuileries and trained on the hall of the Convention. The deputies thought all was over. Collot-d'Herbois took the chair, which was directly in range, put on his hat, and calmly said, as Henriot gave the order to fire, "We can at least die at our post." No volley came--the men had mutinied. Then the Convention declared Henriot beyond the protection of the law, and Henriot fled to the City Hall. The Convention chose Barras to command their armed force, but save a few police they had no force. The night was wearing away and Fleuriot had not been able to persuade Robespierre to take any decisive step. Robespierre was, indeed, only a pettifogging attorney. At length he consented to sign an appeal to arms. He had written two letters of his name--"Ro"--when a section of police under Barras reached the City Hall. They were but a handful, but the door was unguarded. They mounted the stairs and as Robespierre finished the "o", one of these men, named Merda, fired on him, breaking his jaw. The stain of blood is still on the paper where Robespierre's head fell. They shot Couthon in the leg, they threw Henriot out of the window into a cesspool below where he wallowed all night, while Le Bas blew out his brains. The next day they brought Robespierre to the Convention, but the Convention refused to receive him. They threw him on a table, where he lay, horrible to be seen, his coat torn down the back, his stockings falling over his heels, his shirt open and soaking with blood, speechless, for his mouth was filled with splinters of his broken jaw. Such was the man who the morning before had been Dictator, and master of all the armies of France. Couthon was in little better plight. Twenty-one in all were condemned on the 10 Thermidor and taken in carts to the guillotine. An awful spectacle. There was Robespierre with his disfigured face, half dead, and Fleuriot, and Saint-Just, and Henriot next to Robespierre, his forehead gashed, his right eye hanging down his cheek, dripping with blood, and drenched with the filth of the sewer in which he had passed the night. Under their feet lay the cripple Couthon, who had been thrown in like a sack. Couthon was paralyzed, and he howled in agony as they wrenched him straight to fasten him to the guillotine. It took a quarter of an hour to finish with him, while the crowd exulted. A hundred thousand people saw the procession and not a voice or a hand was raised in protest. The whole world agreed that the Terror should end. But the oldest of those who suffered on the 10 Thermidor was Couthon, who was thirty-eight, Robespierre was thirty-five, and Saint-Just but twenty-seven.