FRANCE, as already observed, was a highly centralized state. Seven hundred thousand Parisians, affecting to speak for the entire nation, had accomplished a new revolution without pretending to consult the wishes of their 24,000,000 fellow citizens in the departments. When the news spread of the downfall of the King, the rest of France received it dumbly. Many of the more radical were, of course, glad to have Louis go, out of mere hatred of monarchy. The bulk of the peasantry would doubtless have been pleased to have matters quiet down, so that they might live peaceably on their little farms. But the foreign foe was advancing. Would not the feudal dues and the hated taxes return if the Prussians took Paris? Would any of the newly won personal liberties then be secure? With the nation in tumult, with the foe advancing, with everything, public or personal, that was precious at stake, what was there left but to accept a republic and to arm for the great emergency? That was the spirit of France in August and September, 1792. It was practically impossible to refuse to be a radical, because the radicals were the only people that had a programme which promised safety for the nation.
While the election to the new "Convention" was taking place, the old "Legislative" continued nominally in powerruling France by means of an Executive Council of Five, but it was speedily evident that the real disposing power lay with the Commune of Paris, men of ultra-Jacobin stamp, that speedily showed intense jealousy of the more moderate Girondists who seemed to represent the departments rather than the turbid capital. There was no time for petty bickerings, however. At the mouth of the Loire the pious peasantry in the Vendée district had taken arms, mainly because of the laws against the non-juring priests. The Prussians were pressing forward. Longwy was taken; then came the fell tidings that Verdun, already one of the keys to an advance on Paris, had surrendered. The news stirred the capital to frantic energy. There were hasty levies and military preparations, but the Jacobins feared an attack from the rear no less than from the front. The King and Queen were helpless, but not so the thousands of Royalists and upper bourgeoisie who might be praying for reaction. Late in August the gates of Paris were closed, and the whole city searched by detachments of the National Guard for suspects and sympathizers with the fallen régime. Soon three thousandodd persons were in the overflowing prisons, but Danton at least was not satisfied. "To stop the enemy," he said bluntly, "we must make the Royalists fear."
Danton in fact was working himself and his followers up into that heroic condition of mind which presages great victories or overwhelming defeat. Even across the century sounds his voice, as it trumpeted in the "Legislative" on September 2. "The signal-gun thunders! It sounds the charge upon the enemies of France! Conquer them! Boldness, and more boldness, and ever more boldness, and France is saved!" This was an appeal which sent the blood of his countrymen tingling, and caused the "Legislative" to vote that every man who could not march to the frontier should give his weapons to one who could, or be branded forever as infamous.
But Danton and Marat (then his coadjutor) knew well how "to make the Royalists fear." Possibly the actual deed of blood was without Danton's instigation. Marat was certainly more able to manage such a project. We do not know just how the acts which followed were organized. The fact is that between September 2 and 7, a band of three hundred assassins, the scum of humanity, directed and paid six francs per day by the Commune, proceeded from prison to prison. They dragged out the political prisoners, gave them the barest travesty of a trial, or no trial at all, and then slaughtered the victims in cold blood. A very few prisoners were spared by some caprice or a flash of mercy, but eleven hundred persons thus perished in Paris. The rage of the murderers went out particularly against the priests. Two hundred and fifty of them were slaughtered. Moderate men in the "Legislative" wrung their hands, but were helpless. The soldiers would not defend the prisons when the band of assassins drew nigh. The Jacobins had ended the danger of a Royalist uprising in Paris for a surety!
The slaughter ceased on September 7. On September 20 was fought a battle which terminated the last hope of rescue and vengeance for the shivering survivors of the Old Régime. It was not a mighty battle as battles went, even in the eighteenth century, but its importance was to outlast that of scores of other more extensive passages-at-arms.
The new Republican rulers of France had found a fairly capable general – Dumouriez. He hastened to the front and held council with the officers of the nigh demoralized army that was trying to halt the Prussian advance from Verdun. Many opinions favored a hasty retreat to Reims, north of the Marne. This would have saved the army, but it would have uncovered the road to Paris. Dumouriez was resolved to risk a battle, and saw the great possibilities of the Argonne Forest in checking an attack from Verdun. With thirteen thousand men he took his stand at Grand-Pré where one hundred and twenty-six years later other Republicans were to grapple with other Prussians. He sent a grandiloquent dispatch to the War Minister at the capitol: "Verdun is taken: I await the Prussians. The camp of Grand-Pré is the Thermopylæ of France, but I will be more fortunate than Leonidas!"
The Duke of Brunswick, however, presently pushed forward and turned his flank, and Dumouriez fell back rather ingloriously from Grand-Pré without a battle. His policy, nevertheless, was not an absolute failure. The Prussians had believed that they had only to advance and enter Paris without resistance. They had brought very scanty provisions. It was raining incessantly. The bad roads were knee-deep in mud. Dysentery was ravaging their files. Besides, all was not well between Prussia and her "dear ally" Austria. There was grievous friction in the East over the spoils of unhappy Poland. The Duke and King Frederick William II his master had not the least desire to be chivalrously rescuing Marie Antoinette, while Francis II was taking a firm grip on Warsaw. Catherine, the mighty Czarina of Russia, was also making every sign of willingness to take advantage of the fact that Prussia might be tied up in a serious war with France. Every day, therefore, that the French blocked the road diminished the chance of getting to Paris. So it came to pass that, on the 20th of September, Brunswick tried out the French lines to see if there would really be serious resistance – and learned to his satisfaction.
About six miles east of Sainte-Menehould on the present railway from Reims, going to Verdun, there is the small village of Valmy. Here Brunswick found the heights lined with the battalions of Kellermann, Dumouriez's most efficient lieutenant. There was a brisk cannonade with the old-style six- and ninepounders. Then the Prussian infantry swung forward with the rhythmic step and discipline made famous by Frederick the Great. Kellermann's men waited their coming steadily, never answering the musket-fire until, when close at hand, they charged forth with the bayonet, and for perhaps the first time upon a stricken field rang out the battle-cry of the revolutionary, militant France – "Vive la nation!" The Prussian lines recoiled. Brunswick hesitated to press home a second do-or-die charge. The cannon boomed till dusk, but the infantry fighting was over. An indecisive repulse for the Prussians: that seemed the whole of the matter.
But in fact the Duke had found the answer to his question. The French had not fled. To get to Paris he must fight a great decisive battle, which, if lost, might leave the Prussian army so shaken that the Austrians could strangle their hated rival. Brunswick halted, negotiated. The French "emigrants" vainly urged another advance, but he had learned how they could lie to him in saying that Paris could be reached without a desperate effort. He vainly offered to retire if the French would restore Louis on the basis of the wrecked Constitution; but the stern word came back from Paris, "that the French Republic [just officially proclaimed] could listen to no proposition until the Prussian troops had entirely evacuated French territory." And the Prussian promptly bowed to the order! Truth was he was only too anxious to quit a losing game. On September 30, the formidable army that was to have "restored the Bourbons" was in full retreat. It did not even try to hold Verdun and Longwy. The frontiers were cleared of the enemy – and so the Republic won its first great triumph.
As might be imagined, considering the time when the elections were held, the balloting (open to practically all Frenchmen over twenty-five years of age) sent to the Convention an even greater number of radicals than those in the "Legislative." The new body that was "to give happiness to France" contained 782 members. Of these, 75 had been in the "Constituent" and 183 in the "Legislative." Among the members were not lacking a decidedly large number of men of moderate views and with no cast-iron theories for exploitation, but these deputies were not organized and therefore they were at the mercy of a compact, aggressive minority. Besides, the members from the departments were frequently weakened and intimidated by the atmosphere of Paris – the eagerness of the leaders of the capital for a régime of "thorough" and their equal willingness to carry their end by very brutish physical means.
The Girondists numbered about 120. They were full of zeal for a Republic, but it was to be a well-poised, reasonable Republic, restrained from flying off into social and economic vagaries. The Jacobins could not count on more than 50 reliable members, whereof 24, however, came from Paris. They desired a far more complete overturning of the world and "breaking of fetters" than did the Girondists. Had passions been less deep, and blood been cooler, the Girondists and Jacobins would have discovered that they did not differ so violently in theories but that they could reach a fair compromise. The gulf betwixt them was really personal and temperamental. The Girondists were amiable idealists. The Jacobins, with all their sins, never left the earth for the clouds. While Vergniaud was saying, "I would conquer the world by love," Robespierre was expediting schemes for the prompter use of the guillotine. The Girondists, however, far outnumbered the Jacobins. They could also make the better appeal to the unattached majority of moderates; but the Convention, for its sorrow, met in Paris, and the Commune and mob of Paris, affecting to speak for the masses of France, could give the Jacobins the persuasive support of muskets and pikes when their projects needed a majority. This great fact explains much which followed. The Convention met on September 21, 1792. It at once confirmed the proclamation of the Republic. It then devoted its whole energies to the great project for rebuilding France on a completely democratic basis. "To make the people" was the phrase of Camille Desmoulins, Danton's clever friend. When, however, the crude theories of Rousseau were rigidly and mercilessly applied by inexperienced men, what could follow but a heinous form of despotism?
The Girondists at first seemed to have the upper hand. They had the habits of gentlemen, preferred clean linen, and did not appreciate Marat's sordid rags or the obscenity of Hébert, darling though the latter was of the dregs of the Paris populace. They were soon at odds with the Jacobins before whose savage attacks their power drifted away, although for a while they kept control of the public ministries.
The "Mountain" (that is, the Jacobins and their allies) now determined to press for the trial of the King. The Girondists realized that Louis was largely the victim of his rank and of circumstances, and that the Republic would gain by a show of mercy, but Saint-Just, Robespierre's especial admirer, and a very ardent Jacobin, spoke thus for his party: "The death of the tyrant is necessary to reassure those who fear that one day they will be punished for their daring, and also to terrify those who have not yet renounced monarchy." And Robespierre himself uttered the accepted philosophy on the case: "When a nation has been forced into insurrection, it returns to a state of nature with regard to the tyrant. There is no longer any law but the safety of the people."
The unfortunate King was therefore tried before the whole Convention. He was charged with "conspiring against the public liberty and an attempt against the general safety." In other words, he had not faithfully accepted the Constitution of 1791, and had not done his best to resist the Austrian. Probably these charges were true; but wise statesmen would have said that to have punished Louis XVI for swerving from the path of technical duty in 1792 was cruelty merely disguised as legal justice. The Jacobins were determined to have his blood, both because they hated him and still more because they wished to discredit the Girondists. The latter knew that the King ought to be acquitted, but they made only ineffective efforts to save him. The Jacobin shouters and rabble packed the gallery of the Convention, cheered the prosecution, howled and threatened when words were said in defense. Nevertheless Louis was given the forms of a fair trial. He was skillfully defended by his old minister Malesherbes. There is little doubt that the Convention rendered a legally just verdict when it unanimously declared Louis "guilty." The real question came on the penalty. The Jacobins clamored for blood. The Girondists made frantic appeals for moderation, but could not set themselves effectively against the shoutings and coercion. On January 20, 1793, Louis was ordered immediately to the scaffold by a majority of one vote. The clamor of the galleries had affected the nerves of enough Girondists to decide the issue.
The King was guillotined publicly on January 21, dying bravely, and spending his last hours in a manner worthy of a monarch and a Christian – thus effacing much of the evil impression he had given the world during the last troubled years of his reign. The Jacobins openly rejoiced at the tragedy. "Your party is ruined!" Danton told the Girondists, and more openly he defied the hostile Powers of Europe, proclaiming, "Let us fling down to the kings the head of a king as gage of battle"; while Marat exulted because "We have burned our ships behind us."
Already, before this tragedy, the actions of France had driven the old monarchies of Europe to a frenzy. The Convention openly advocated carrying the blessings of Republican freedom to every other nation. On November 19, 1792, Danton had persuaded it to decree that France would grant "assistance and fraternity" to all peoples who wished to recover their liberties. What was that but a direct invitation to the subjects of every king to revolt? It had been issued at the very minute when, by a reversal of previous fortune, the valiant young armies of the Republic were driving the Austrians out of Belgium, following an amazing victory at Jemappes near Mons. The seizure of Antwerp, a city which England could never tolerate in the possession of a powerful maritime rival, forced Britain into war (February 1, 1793). The order-loving English people and ministers were already horrified at the steady trend of the tidings from across the Channel. Spain, Holland, and all the lesser States of the German Empire now made haste to imitate the greater Powers, and by their hostile attitude forced the Convention to declare war upon them.
By the middle of March, 1793, France was at war with practically every important state in Western Europe. While the Republic was thus ringed around with foreign enemies, the peasants of the Vendée were likewise in dangerous insurrection. Promptly on the heels of these serious tidings came actual reports of disaster. The French army, that had penetrated into Belgium, was driven thence with heavy loss. Mayence, which had also fallen into French hands, was retaken by the Germans. Worst of all, Dumouriez, the best general of the Republic, turned traitor and went over to the Austrians. The situation was in some respects more serious than just before Valmy.
Once more it was Danton who rose to the crisis. No demagogic leader ever carried himself more dauntlessly than did he in the face of the crowding perils. His opponents had made bitter attacks upon his character. Disdainfully he swept all these aside. "What matters my reputation," said he on March 10. "May France be free, and my name forever sullied. . . . We must break the situation by a great effort. Let us conquer Holland. Let us reanimate the Republican party in England. Let us make France march forward, and we shall go down glorious to posterity. Fulfill your great destiny. No more debates! No more quarrels – and the nation is saved!"
To meet the emergency Danton and his fellow Jacobins forged a terrible weapon – a multi-headed dictatorship. It was the famous "Committee of Public Safety," at first of nine, then of twelve members, clothed with almost autocratic power to crush all foes of the Republic without and within. Marat summed up its theory in a word: "We must establish the despotism of liberty to crush the despotism of kings."
The Girondists were still nominally in power, appointing the ministers and otherwise conducting the Government. The Committee was now set over regular ministers, and was allowed to send commissioners to each of the armies to supervise and spur to activity the generals, and summarily to remove and punish the inefficient and treacherous. Once a week the Committee was supposed to report to the Convention, but its own deliberations were secret. The checks upon it were very slight. "The Convention soon became the slave of the Committee. As for the Ministry, it was left with a mere shadow of authority."
Working with this all-powerful executive committee was its counterpart the "Committee of General Security," a secret body which controlled the police, drew up lists of suspects, and sent the accused before the terrible "Revolutionary Tribunal." This was a standing court martial, whose judges and juries dealt out wholesale penalties to practically all the unfortunate Royalist aristocrats and reactionaries, or even "moderates," haled to its judgment bar. Soon the public executioner began to work with increasing frequency. "France," ran the saying, "was becoming Republican to the strokes of the guillotine."
The Committee of Public Safety and its adjunct committed crimes the record whereof abides through all history, but this awful body can plead at least one great merit – it saved France. With astounding energy the new dictators plunged into their work. Danton had done much to get the Committee initiated, but he declined a position upon it. He was a master agitator rather than a great executive. The Jacobins forced the Convention to choose persons of practical ability rather than glib talkers. Robespierre was elected, but he and his devoted follower, Saint-Just, were the only members who can be put down as steady orators in the Convention, except possibly the slippery Barère. Only one of twelve could claim anything like genius, but he was of sufficient ability to make up for much patriotic mediocrity – Carnot, who took over the special charge of the army, and who was to become the "Organizer of Victory" and a real savior of France.
But while the Committee summoned the nation to arms and bade every Frenchman brace himself for the national emergency, the Jacobins had their grim reckoning with the Girondists. These clever idealists were still talking much and doing little. They denounced the September massacres and the politicians who were responsible for them; but they let the King be done to death, though they knew that the act was one of cruelty, and they were unable to enforce any steps whereby new massacres might become impossible. The majority of the Convention was still under the spell of their oratory, but coming as they did nearly all from the Southern Departments, they had little influence over the Commune of Paris and its mob. On June 2, 1793, the Jacobins and the Commune deliberately surrounded the hall of the Convention with a pack of hired ruffians, and held all the deputies prisoner until they would consent to order the arrest of thirty-one members, for the most part prominent Girondists. "You see, gentlemen," announced the radicals' spokesman ironically, "that you are respected and obeyed by the people, and that you can vote on the question which is submitted to you. Lose no time, then, in complying with their wishes!" The Convention was helpless. It had no armed force to rescue it from the mob. The thirty-one were ordered suspended, and by this one stroke the Jacobins had completed their triumph. All the other deputies understood now who were the masters of the situation.
So in Paris, but not in France. In some respects the contest was one of the departments against the capital. Already not merely in the Vendée, but elsewhere, were the Royalists showing their heads. There was grave discontent at the proceedings in Paris. Many Girondist deputies now fled to their home districts and endeavored to commence an insurrection against the capital and its despots of the Commune. Had there been a common organization and rallying-place for the insurgents, they might well have succeeded; probably they commanded much more than half of the population and good-will of France. But they were scattered, ill-organized, and lacked all first-class leadership. The Jacobins accused them of coquetting with the Royalists, or with a scheme to make the regions of France into a loose "federation" as opposed to "the Republic, one and indivisible," and in view of the crowding foreign peril many patriotic men, naturally merciful and reasonable, saw nothing to do but to sustain the Paris dictators.
The Jacobin Committee crushed this spasmodic insurrection which flared up in many districts, with all the ruthlessness of fear and anger. Lyons which had risen, mainly at the Girondists' behest, was captured by the Republican army, and a solemn decree of the Convention ordered, in the words of Barère, "Lyons warred against liberty. Lyons exists no more." It was directed that the city should be actually destroyed. In practice only about forty houses were demolished, but a great number of the unfortunate inhabitants were put to death, not by the guillotine, but by grapeshot. At Nantes, where the Royalist Vendéans had had sympathizers, the notorious Carrier rejoiced in wholesale executions of the well-born and bourgeoisie, as well as of less genteel victims. Some hundreds were shipped to Paris for trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal, but at least eighteen hundred prisoners were shot by firing squads without any trial; and then to complete the work Carrier ordered wholesale "drownings" in the Loire, "Republican marriages" – men and women bound together and sunk in the current. This was an extreme case. But there were hideous scenes at Marseilles, Bordeaux, Toulon, and other cities that had dared to show favor to the Girondists. The whole attempt to defy the Paris Government was thus stifled in blood.
While the Committee was thus handling a desperate internal situation, it was performing an even greater work upon the frontier. The war had become almost a death-grapple between all the old monarchies of Europe and the young Republicanism of France. Hitherto armies had almost invariably consisted of professional soldiers, slowly enlisted, slowly drilled, and their numbers strictly limited to those which a given king could conveniently pay, outfit, and ration. A general levy of the masses would have been abhorrent to the average monarch. It would have taught his peasants the use of arms which they might speedily turn against authority. No such scruples held back the Jacobins. A levy en masse was decreed at first of 300,000, then of more, until by the end of 1793 France had at least 750,000 men under arms – a prodigious number considering the difficulties then of transport, commissariat, and munitions. Church bells were cast into cannon, every available workshop became a weapon factory. Carnot, the war minister, displayed an amazing genius in overcoming all the practical difficulties in maintaining so great a host.
The new levies were often very ill-trained, but they had a passionate courage, a willingness to die for France and the "Rights of Man" beneath their beloved tricolor, which made them terrible foes to the mechanically disciplined mercenaries sent up against them. In the days before machine guns and barbed wire there were few battle-lines that could be held against a bayonet charge of reckless enthusiasts who cared not if they fell provided their comrades behind could carry on the flag to victory. It was this dashing ardor of a people just learn. ing to be free that decided many a stricken field. Another very decisive factor was the admirable, tough physique and the sustained marching qualities of the French peasants, who, man for man, probably constituted far better fighting material than part at least of the larger, bonier Northern soldiery pitted against them – even as the poilusof France were to teach the world again in 1914.
Bravery, enthusiasm, and stamina could not do everything; above all they could not give the French generals skill in the technique of war. This was the weakest link at first in the national armor. The old officers from the noblesse were dead or in exile. The new officers – traders, tapsters, and ploughman's sons perhaps – had yet to learn a great deal. But under the whip and spur of circumstance this corps of new and very young officers developed rapidly. The Central Committee was ruthless in weeding out mediocrity and in punishing incompetence. With every army went at least two "deputies on mission" from the Convention, to see everything, to report everything, above all to suspend the commanding general if he showed any signs of incapacity. "The generals of the raw levies knew that they must win if they must live. Failure was interpreted by the deputies and the Revolutionary Tribunal to mean treason, and not a few officers, like Westermann and Gustine, expiated their defeats on the scaffold."
The effort of this army of liberated France, the most intelligent, devoted national army which the modern world up to that time had ever seen, was bound to produce enormous results. The kings and the comfortable military bureaucrats of Europe were confounded at this advent of a new force, as much moral as it was material, which met their well-trained but rather apathetic "regulars" in battle after battle. During the greater part of 1793 the French held their frontiers only by the most desperate exertions, but in the autumn the struggle definitely shifted in their favor. The English and Hanoverians were forced to raise the siege of Dunkirk, the Austrians were defeated at Wattignies (near Maubeuge) by Jourdan, one of the most competent leaders discovered by Carnot, and at Weissenburg in northern Alsace the Austrians were hurled back beyond the confines of France. Likewise in December, Toulon, the great southern naval port, which had gone over to the English, rather than submit to the Jacobins, was retaken – thanks to the skill of a young artillery officer named Bonaparte. "Better that 25,000,000 human beings should perish than the Republic, One and Indivisible!" had been the saying during these months of crisis – and the Republic had not perished.
While thus the spirit of a great ideal, the ideal of a world emancipated from slavery and dedicated to liberty, fraternity, and human happiness, was animating the youth of France to fight and suffer on the frontier, their masters, the Jacobins, were more grimly holding their own and trying to execute their programme at Paris. The Revolution had, of course, been accompanied by widespread economic prostration. Factories lacked alike customers, raw material, and workmen. Peasants were hesitating to till their farms and to dispatch their grain to market. Paris grew increasingly hungry and therefore dangerous. The assignats were depreciating to a point almost equal to that of the Confederate currency in America in 1865. The Convention and the Committee fought against this crisis with weapons condemned by every modern economist, but they were used not wholly in vain. Speculators in corn and assignats found themselves often and very suddenly before the dread Revolutionary Tribunal. A drastic "Law of the Maximum" regulated the price for grain and flour, and fixed the death penalty for transgressors. Farmers and dealers who refused to open their stores at legal prices were arrested wholesale. Owing to the good fortune which sent a very fair harvest in 1793, and to the inherent ingenuity of the French lower classes in meeting trying conditions as well as to these Draconian edicts, this year was tided over without unbearable suffering. Economic conditions continued bad until well after 1795, but they were by no means so intolerable as in Russia in 1917 and 1918. The French bourgeoisie and peasants (even the most doctrinaire of their leaders) were to prove far more practical and intelligent than the Russian soviets, bolshevists, and mujiks in the first two years of their national reconstruction and agony.
Paris, therefore, lived her life, while the Convention listened to endless speeches, while the Committee and the Tribunal met for their grim work, and while Carnot organized his fourteen armies. The theaters were open, there were innumerable newspapers, mostly devoted to violent personal politics; and all the little wine-shops buzzed and sometimes thundered. But the entire time the fear of the "Republican razor" lurked in the heart of every man. After this epoch was over, it was asked of a prominent member of the Convention, Sieyès, what he did during those years? "I lived," came back the brief but sufficient reply. For these were the years of "The Terror."
Even despite the clangor without and the tension within, the Convention found time to give serious attention to permanent questions of reform. By no means was all the legislation then enacted bad. A new system of weights and measures was introduced – the famous metric system – so excellent that presently it was to be adopted by nearly all civilization outside of the English-speaking lands. A special committee worked bravely on a sagacious scheme for national education, with primary schools, central schools, and a normal school to equip competent teachers. A second committee wrestled with the question of a codification of the Civil Law – a problem not to be solved till the days of Napoleon. Less commendable was the attack of the old established "slave style" calendar, with its names and divisions recalling Roman despotism ("July," "August") and Christian holy-days and festivals. In its place came a "natural" calendar conceived in the very spirit of Rousseau. The new era was made to date from the establishment of the Republic, September 21, 1792. Then began the "Year I." Within the reformed year were twelve months, with new names, and divided, not into weeks, but into "decades" of ten days each. The initial day of each decade was a holiday for the celebration of the "Republic virtues," to the complete abandonment of Sunday with its reminiscences of "superstition."
Everything else connected with the Old Régime seemed on the point of being consigned to the rubbish heap. It was no longer patriotic (or therefore safe) to address a person as other than "Citizen" or "Citizeness." The royal tombs in Saint-Denis were violated; the dust of the kings who had made France great was flung into a ditch. The Christian religion was not formally proscribed, but only the services of the time-serving schismatic clergy, who would take the oath of obedience to the "civil constitution" for the Church, were permissible – a fact which put all the more upright and devout of the priesthood under the ban. The piety of the "constitutional" priests may be judged by the fact that in November, 1793, Gobel, the Bishop of Paris, and other prominent churchmen came before the Convention and seem to have openly disavowed Christianity. The churches, in most parts of France at least, were being changed into "civil temples," their altars pillaged, their glorious stained-glass windows smashed to bits as reminiscent of superstitions and slavery which Republican enlightenment had abolished.
As to what was to be put in place of the Church, which was become almost as objectionable now as the Monarchy, good Republicans were divided. Robespierre and the more consistent followers of Rousseau's theories were quite sure there ought to be a "pure" cult of the "Supreme Being." The grosser Jacobins of the Commune of Paris, led by their chief spirit Hébert, wanted only an atheistical worship of "Reason"; and on November 10, 1793, the Convention declared this last to be the official cult, marching as a body in red liberty caps to Notre Dame, while an unprudish actress sat upon the altar as "The Goddess of Reason," and even coarser women danced the carmagnole under the gray vaulting of the nave. Elsewhere in France there were even less edifying spectacles – at Lyons a donkey was adorned with a miter, made to drink from the sacred chalice, with a crucifix and Bible tied to his tail. All this disgusted Robespierre, who wished to be anti-Christian without being atheistic, and some of these viler outrages were presently suppressed; but not till after 1795 was it to be altogether safe to hold Catholic worship publicly without fear of molestation.
All this, however, was mere detail compared with the great task of reorganizing France on a new basis as laid down by Rousseau's doctrine. The controlling Jacobins had perforce to divide up the management of the problems of the hour between themselves; and the main energies of Carnot, and to a certain extent of Danton, were devoted to flinging back the invader. To lesser men they left the task of making the home front safe, and insuring the coming of the longed-for Utopia. This was the prosperous hour of Robespierre. The foreign danger, the domestic peril, the fear of a Royalist reaction (which under the circumstances could not be other than vengeful and bloody), all these were reasons for hideous action, for silencing every possible dissident under the falling knife. Robespierre, with every quality of a fanatic, – intense conviction of the justice of his philosophy, equally intense conviction of the criminality of every person who could not accept its logic and dicta, – was thus to have his way; until men really abler and more powerful than himself came to feel in peril for their own lives. Then suddenly the whole bloody Terror stopped.
The earlier months of the Republic had not been stained by many executions despite the tragedy of the King. Now, while 1793 advanced, the Revolutionary Tribunal was divided into two sections to double its speed and its victims began to multiply. The property of the condemned was confiscated to the State, which income helped to meet the deficit. "We coin money by the guillotine," said Barère cynically in the Convention. In September was voted the terrible "Law of Suspects" subjecting to arrest not merely the courtiers of the Old Régime and others who had probably a motive in halting the Revolution, but all others who were detected "speaking of the misfortunes of the Republic and the shortcomings of the authorities."
This sinister change produced instant results. The prisons, already full, now were soon overflowing. In October, 1793, twenty-two of the luckless Girondists were sent to the scaffold, the heroic Madame Roland making her famous saying, as she stood before the guillotine, "O Liberty, how many crimes are committed in thy name!" Her male comrades went also to their fate with like serene courage. "I die at a time when the people have lost their senses," said Lasource to his judges. "You will die when they recover them." And the whole band sang with perfect steadiness the "Marseillaise" while they waited their turn before the executioner.
Already a more remarkable victim had been the widowed Queen herself. Had Marie Antoinette been prosecuted for treason immediately following the downfall of the Monarchy, there would certainly have been more justice in condemning her than her unfortunate husband. It was now little less than bloodthirstiness to send her to death. A good legal charge of aiding the Austrians might have been made out, but her trial was only a farce. Like the King, Marie Antoinette died bravely and nobly, as became the daughter of the great Maria Theresa, obliterating by her courage as a condemned prisoner the memory of many of the blunders and worse things chargeable against her as a queen.
From November, 1793, onward (Barère had cheerfully put it as early as September), "Terror became the order of the day." The Revolutionary Tribunal became increasingly busy, and the guillotine seldom missed a prisoner once he was placed before the dread judge, prosecutor, and jury. For a man once a "suspect" practically the only escape was a satisfactory answer to the question, "What have you done worthy of death if the Royalists come back to power?" After the recapture of Toulon every citizen who failed to show signs of joy fell under suspicion. It was enough merely to prove that a defendant had not been an enthusiastic supporter of the latest ukase from the Jacobin Club. There were even victims sent under the knife for being "moderates" The cold statistics of the executions in Paris in 1793-94 tell the story of increasing recklessness and fanaticism. In December, 69 perished; in January, 1794, 71; in February, 73; in March, 127; in April, 257; in May, 353; and in June and July together 1376. "This sudden increase in the number of executions," it is well written, "was due to the efforts of Robespierre to establish his Utopia."
There is a difference of opinion among modern specialists as to how far Robespierre personally was responsible for the deeds which have rendered his name execrable to every honest man, and sacred to every anarchist. Certainly other members of the Committee of Public Safety – for example, Billaud-Varenne and Collot d'Herbois – were no less bloodthirsty than he. However, Robespierre in any case was often their spokesman in their conventions, covered their most drastic propositions with elegant phrases about securing the public "happiness" and "liberty," and probably toward the end he was, indeed, little less than an uncrowned dictator, possessed by the horrible gospel that since he understood the sole means of securing justice and prosperity for France, whosoever failed to applaud his extreme doctrines was worthy of death; and he certainly was inflexible in carrying out this theory.
Robespierre rapidly divested himself of possible rivals. One coadjutor, and it might have been competitor for popular influence, had already passed away. Marat, the "People's Friend," had been murdered in July, 1793, by the heroic Charlotte Corday, striking her dagger in behalf of the outlawed Girondists. There remained two other presumptive adversaries: Hébert the brutal, obscene leader of the Paris Commune and champion of the most stalwart atheism, and the redoubtable Danton. Robespierre hated Hébert because the latter was disgracing the Revolution by his "Festivals to Reason" and also his travesty of Rousseau's naturalism by his sheer bestiality. Hébert was powerful in the Paris Commune and among the dregs of the populace, and it strained Robespierre's influence to get him at last sent before the Tribunal. Nevertheless, on March 24, 1794, Hébert, the roaring blasphemer, perished. Had Robespierre stopped here, some things might have been forgiven him.
But the "dictator" turned next on Danton himself. Of all men who should have been immune before the Tribunal, Danton ought to have been the first. For the overthrow of Monarchy, the September massacres, the execution of the King, the drastic measures to beat back the foreigner, the defiance of Europe, nay, for the setting-up of the Committee of Public Safety and the Revolutionary Tribunal itself, Danton was more responsible than any other single mortal. But Danton, despite all these things, was committing a deadly crime against the "beneficial and good" theories of the Jacobins; he was becoming a "moderate."
Danton could probably have scattered all his assailants by one resolute charge had he but willed to do so; but he remained singularly passive. He was a man of spasmodic achievement, not of continuous action. He had declined a place in the secret Committees and for a time had withdrawn partially into private life. At length he and his friends had begun to hint plainly that since the national crisis, caused by foreign foes and by rebels, was largely past, there was no need for continuing the wholesale executions. If this meant anything it meant that Robespierre was not to bring to pass immediately his Elysium, into which he evidently intended to drive all Frenchmen at the point of the sword. That was enough to settle the fate of the greatest of the Jacobins.
When told he was threatened, Danton refused to use revolutionary means (which he might have invoked) to confound his adversaries. "I would rather," he said contemptuously, "be guillotined than be a guillotiner; besides, my life is not worth the trouble, and I am sick of the world." Nevertheless, when he was arrested and placed before the Tribunal, the prosecution dared not allow him to make even the limited defense allowed to ordinary victims. He was silenced as "wanting in respect to justice" and condemned practically without a hearing on charges so ridiculous and insignificant that his condemnation sinks to the level of a common murder. With him was sentenced his friend, Camille Desmoulins, the first to raise Paris in arms before the taking of the Bastile. "Show my head to the people," ordered Danton haughtily to the executioner; "they do not see the like thereof every day." And so he passed (April 5, 1794).
It was well said that the French Revolution, like the god Saturn of ancient mythology, "devoured its own children."
Marat was gone, Hébert was gone; and now Danton also. Of the great idealists whose Bible was the "Social Contract," and who had dreamed of making a new universe according to the gospel of Rousseau, who save Robespierre and his immediate satellites remained? The dictator (it is fair now to call Robespierre that) had destroyed the Hébertists as "impure men of faction"; the Dantonists as "indulgents and men of immorality." Now surely there was nothing to hinder the régime of "thorough"! By this time probably only a minor fraction of Parisians and a much smaller fraction of Frenchmen at large had anything but abhorrence for the Terrorists, yet so absolute had been the suppression of every act of resistance, so prompt the punishment even for "incivism" (that is, the least suggestion of lukewarmness) that the entire nation seemed hypnotized and helpless before an aggressive, organized, and perfectly unscrupulous minority. Robespierre's real reign dates from the 5th of April to the 27th of July, 1794. During that time he seemingly exercised a power of life and death over Frenchmen incalculably greater than that of Louis XIV. He might have continued his power longer had he possessed the wisdom not to smite terror for their own lives into men who had either been his cowardly tools or his bloody accomplices.
During April, May, and June, Robespierre and his evernarrowing band of prime counselors drove straight toward their mark by decree after decree calculated to silence dissenters from "the Doctrine," and to concentrate all power in Paris where "the pure" could control all public acts. All the Parisian clubs were closed except the Jacobin Club, that the others might not become centers for insurrection. All the extraordinary tribunals in the departments were ordered to stop working, and to send their cases to the greater and more pitiless central assize in Paris. When Robespierre rose to move a decree in the Convention, opposition for the nonce seemed absolutely hushed. No man knew better than he how to proclaim a policy of ruthlessness and to cover it with words dripping with philanthropy and idealistic benevolence. The Terror was blandly advocated as a necessary expedient to introduce the reign of "virtue"; the guillotine was for "the amelioration of souls." His coadjutors were more frank. "The dead alone do not return," said Barère, while Collot d'Herbois cynically declared, "The more freely the social body perspires the more healthy it becomes."
Robespierre himself was now, of course, the subject of the grossest flattery. "The great Incorruptible" was everywhere praised for his virtue, his genius, and his eloquence. The apogee of his career came on June 8, 1794, when, at his instigation, an enormous festival was held "in honor of the Supreme Being," on which day the Convention proceeded in high procession to the garden of the Tuileries, with Robespierre walking fifteen feet ahead of his insignificant colleagues, attired in all the brave dress of a dandy of the period, and carrying an offering to the Deity of flowers and ears of corn. Then, after burning three huge effigies of "Atheism," "Discord," and "Selfishness," this high-priest of the new Deism delivered a pompous speech, containing the ominous words: "People! Let us to-day surrender ourselves to the transports of pure delight. To-morrow we will renew our struggle against vices and against tyrants!"
Two days later Couthon (one of the dictator's spokesmen) imparted to the Convention what Robespierre had had in mind. The Revolutionary Tribunal was not working fast enough. There was still some small loophole for the defense. Hereafter the court was to sit daily, and the process of bringing indictments was greatly expedited. No counsel was to be allowed the accused, and "moral proofs" could suffice for a conviction. All "enemies of the people" (a frightfully indefinite phrase) were liable to prosecution, and the jurors need not follow the law, but "only their own consciences" when they voted. Possibly the Convention would have authorized all this without a whimper, but hitherto, to get the arrest of an accused deputy, it had been needful to ask the consent of a majority of his fellow members. This had been a considerable safeguard. Now the deputies themselves could be put on trial on a mere order from the terrible Committee. In substance this was asking every member to look to the safety of his own neck. The weakest animals will turn at bay. Such a request was therefore a grievous blunder.
Robespierre committed a second great blunder when (challenged in the Convention) he refused to name the deputies presumably to be accused. "I will name them when it is necessary," he announced loftily: words which set every member who had ever crossed his path to trembling. In "profound silence" the new decree was passed. From this time the "Terror within the Terror" became more direful than ever. Executions took place in large batches. Often fifty wretches were sent under the knife per day. But the end was drawing nigh.
With all his fanaticism, the dictator hated corruption, immorality, and such forms of cruelty as he had not himself authorized. Powerful and wicked men, high in the Government, who had misused their opportunities had come to fear him. At least three members of the great Committee, including the mighty Carnot, were beginning to oppose him. His attempt to manufacture a new religion was laughed at by presumable supporters. "Your Supreme Being begins to bore me!" sneered Billaud-Varennes. Robespierre had still a great following among the Parisian lower classes, and the reorganized Commune of the capital was devoted to him, but things were obviously moving to a straining point. Late in July the cord, long under tension, snapped.
As things neared a climax the dictator became morose and distrustful. Sturdy Jacobins with clubs accompanied him as a bodyguard. His denunciations became ever more ominous. "All corrupt men," he declared, "must be expelled from the Convention." Who were these corrupt men? Out of despair for their lives, the members who felt themselves threatened made ready to pull the tyrant down. Robespierre knew that there were murmurs and combinations against him, but on July 26 he harangued the Convention in his usual mood: "There exists a conspiracy against the public liberty, that owes its strength to a criminal intrigue within the very heart of the Convention. . . . Punish the traitors! Purify the Committee! Crush every faction, and establish upon their ruins the power of justice and liberty!" Instead of applause he met flat opposition. Cambon (a brave man) said openly: "It is time to speak the whole truth. One man paralyzed the resolution of the assembly. That man is Robespierre."
The debate ended with a flat rebuff for the dictator. The next day each side having mustered its partisans, he endeavored to face the rising storm, but he was howled off of the tribune by the yells not merely of the moderates, but by most of his old Jacobins. "Let the veil [of restraint] be wholly torn aside!" thundered Tallien. "Down with the tyrant!" reëchoed from the members. Robespierre tried vainly to get a hearing. "Pure and virtuous men!" he pleaded, helding out his arms to his one-time laudators – and was met with stony looks or shrill hootings. "Wretch," some one called from an upper bench, "the blood of Danton chokes thee!" With an approving shout the Convention voted the motion that Robespierre, his brother, and three adherents, notably the wild and eloquent young Saint-Just, should be put under arrest. "The Republic is lost, the brigands triumph!" groaned the deposed leader as they dragged him out.
But all was not quite over. The Commune was still on Robespierre's side and controlled the Paris prisons. None of the jailers would receive him. A band of municipal officers took him from his guards and brought him in triumph to the City Hall. "Long live Robespierre!" rang in the streets. A band of armed men, led by the notorious desperado and agitator Henriot, put themselves at his disposal. For some hours the Convention was in agony. Was it not about to be attacked by the mob and all its members massacred? However, the National Guard, after some wavering, decided to support the Convention and not the Commune. The Government's troops, therefore, closed around the City Hall, and seized the band that had already been declared "outlaws." Robespierre shattered his jaw with a pistol while trying to commit suicide. He was still alive, when on the famous "10th of Thermidor" (July 28, 1794) at 5 P.M. he rumbled in the death-cart along the streets, through a crowd that cheered, raved, and screamed for his blood. Twenty-two of his friends mounted the scaffold and then the dread "dictator." When his head fell, the air shook with the applause. The Terror was ended.
The men who had pulled down Robespierre were many of them no more pitiful or scrupulous than their enemy; but they had gained immense popularity by seeming to stop the Terror, and they dared not endanger their position by renewing it. The long intimidated Convention reasserted its liberty of action. The surviving Girondist deputies returned from exile. The Jacobin Club was closed. The worst abusers of justice in the Revolutionary Tribunal were executed themselves. A great many political prisoners were released; the remainder were in no danger of death without fair trial. France, and particularly Paris, shook off the incubus of fear that had brooded over it. Not merely was there a reaction toward moderation; there was even a reaction in favor of Monarchy, especially as it was believed that the kings could be brought back upon conditions that would insure the preservation of the great liberties won in 1789. The Royalists were weakened, indeed, by the report that in 1795 the unlucky Dauphin, son of Louis XVI (a frail boy bereft of parents or decent guardians), had died in prison, apparently by the sheer neglect or worse of his brutal keepers. The heir to the Bourbon claims was now the late King's brother, the Comte de Provence, in exile and notorious as a reactionary. However, the Royalist feeling grew. The bourgeois elements in Paris had reasserted themselves, and supported the reaction. In 1795 there was even a Royalist outbreak that came close to succeeding.
In 1793 the Convention had adopted a constitution of an ultra-democratic nature, strongly tinctured with Jacobin views. It had never actually been put in force and the moment Robespierre fell it was disregarded altogether. In 1795 the deputies produced another constitution which was an honest, if not wholly successful, attempt to avoid the mistakes of the 1791 arrangement, and to set up a Republican Government which should alike steer clear of ultra-radicalism and of Monarchy. There was a much-needed list of the "duties" as well as the "rights" of citizens, and a more debatable effort to exclude the lowest classes, by giving the vote only to men who had lived a year in one place and paid a tax. Such voters could choose "electors," who in turn chose a legislature of two houses, a "Council of Five Hundred" to initiate laws, and a "Council of Ancients" (two hundred and fifty older members) to revise and accept them. For executive the Convention set up neither President nor King, but a five-headed commission. Five "Directors," controlling the ministers, the diplomatic policy, and the army and administrative officers, were to be chosen by the Councils for terms of five years, with one Director retiring annually. Three Directors could speak for the whole. In this way it was hoped that a firm executive was to be created without fear of a dictatorship.
Such a system was in fact too artificial to work well even in peaceful times and with a friendly and submissive citizen body, but the Convention now passed a measure sure to make the new scheme unpopular. The members, especially those who had voted for the death of Louis XVI, were in mortal fear lest the elections should give the Royalists a majority in the newly constituted legislatures. So great was the disgust at the Terror, so great the desires of Frenchmen to settle down in peace after the years of confusion, that such a reaction was extremely probable. The Convention, therefore, in self-protection decided that two thirds of the new legislatures must be elected from among the members of the retiring Convention, thus making sure that the Royalists, at least for a few years, should not be more than a minority.
The respectable element in Paris had now completely gained the upper hand over the Jacobin lower classes, and it was driven to fury by this plain undertaking of the hated radicals to perpetuate their power under a new guise. The National Guard, as reorganized, was at the disposal of the reactionaries, and on October 5, 1795 ("13th of Vendémiaire"), some 40,000 armed Royalists were marching on the hall of the Convention to attempt by violence a change in the Government, thus using a method well taught them by Danton and Marat.
The position of the Convention was serious. It had now decidedly few friends in the city, but the regular army (de votedly Republican) was on its side, and the rather small garrison present was enraged at the idea of recalling the hated Bourbons. The deputies appointed as their leader the energetic Barras, who in turn selected as chief lieutenant a young artillery officer who had won success at the siege of Toulon and who was now waiting idly in Paris – one Napoleon Bonaparte. The latter promptly seized all the artillery at the Sablons camp, and posted it with his 6000 to 7000 men to good advantage around the Tuileries where the Convention was in session. The Royalists marched up to the old palace boldly, expecting to prosper even as had the Dantonists in 1792; but Bonaparte and his artillerymen were not as Louis XVI and his Swiss Guards. The Royalists were met by a deadly cannon fire, which raked the quays by the Seine, and their columns were literally mowed down by the "whiff of grapeshot." After a vain attempt to rally, the insurgents broke, fled, and the battle was over.
The Convention was nominally the victor. The real victor was the army. Bonaparte had arbitrated between legislators and citizens with his cannon. From this time onward until 1815 the army is the true disposing body in France. It was to remain loyal the longest to the Republic, and when its allegiance changed, it was not to be to the Old Monarchy, but to a new Cæsarism.
In October, 1795, the new directors took over the Government. The "Directory" lasted until November, 1799. It is not needful to trace its annals. The real history of France from 1796 onward was to be written in great battles in Italy and then in Egypt by the young officer who had aided Barras. As for the Directors, nearly all of them were mediocre men, however often their personnel changed: they could wrangle much, though accomplish relatively little. Law and order returned in a tolerable extent to France in 1795, although there was still much persecution of the old nobility and of the Catholic clergy. The admirable practical talents of the French people brought back a fair degree of economic prosperity. As early as April, 1795, Prussia had withdrawn from the war in disgust at her Austrian ally, and her Hohenzollern king had made peace by the Treaty of Basel with the radical Republic. The decrepit despotism of Spain had made peace the same year. England, Austria, and Sardinia still continued the war, but they could not really threaten the integrity of France or the fruits of the Revolution.
As might have been expected, the five directors (chosen without the slightest attempt to select persons likely to work together) presently quarreled among themselves. They also wrangled with the legislature, whose relations to the executive had been very poorly adjusted by the new Constitution. In 1797 three Directors combined against two, charging them with "reaction," and with the aid of the army they drove the minority from power. In 1798 and 1799 Bonaparte, who had already overshadowed completely the five little men in Paris, was fighting in Egypt. In his absence the Directors mismanaged affairs outrageously. By the valor of Bonaparte, France had made a victorious peace with Austria in 1797 (Treaty of CampoFormio). The Directors now became involved in a second war with the Austrian Emperor, and when Bonaparte returned from Egypt in 1799, they had little to report to him but defeats in Italy and Switzerland and even a renewed danger to the frontiers. Under these circumstances it was perfectly easy for the scheming and ambitious "Little Corporal," already the darling of the army, to pull down the luckless Constitution of 1795. On November 9, 1799 ("18th of Brumaire"), by a bold stroke of state, aided by the soldiery and by three of the Directors, Bonaparte chased the other two Directors from office, and dispersed the Council of Five Hundred. At the roll of the drum the grenadiers marched into the building of the legislature, and "advancing slowly across the wide width of the hall, presented their bayonets."
What Louis XVI dared not accomplish following the defiance of Mirabeau after the "royal sitting" in 1789, had been dared and done by the man from Corsica. France had again a monarch, albeit a very different kind of a monarch from Louis XVI. Bonaparte proposed to reorganize the government with a very firm executive of three "consuls." His colleagues, provisionally, were to be the supple politician Sieyès and another ex-Director, Ducos. When the trio then gathered for their first session, Sieyès asked mildly, "Who will preside?""Don't you see," answered Ducos, "the general is in the chair!" There was nothing more to be said.
From this time onward, even more than from 1796, the history of France and the biography of Napoleon Bonaparte are absolutely intermingled until the greatest of all adventurers crashed down at Waterloo.