2. Psychology of the Commissaries or Representatives
“on Mission.”
In Paris the conduct of the members of the Convention was
always directed, restrained, or excited by the action of their
colleagues, and that of their environment.
To judge them properly we should observe them when left to
themselves and uncontrolled, when they possessed full liberty.
Such were the representatives who were sent “on mission”
into the departments by the Convention.
The power of these delegates was absolute. No censure
embarrassed them. Functionaries and magistrates had perforce to
obey them.
A representative “on mission”
“requisitions,” sequestrates, or confiscates as seems
good to him; taxes, imprisons, deports, or decapitates as he
thinks fit, and in his own district he is a pasha.”
Regarding themselves as “pashas,” they displayed
themselves “drawn in carriages with six horses, surrounded by
guards; sitting at sumptuous tables with thirty covers, eating to
the sound of music, with a following of players, courtezans, and
mercenaries. . . .” At Lyons “the solemn appearance of
Collot d'Herbois is like that of the Grand Turk. No one can come
into his presence without three repeated requests; a string of
apartments precedes his reception-room, and no one approaches
nearer than fifteen paces.”
One can picture the immense vanity of these
dictators as they solemly entered the towns, surrounded by
guards, men whose gesture was enough to cause heads to fall.
Petty lawyers without clients, doctors without patients,
unfrocked clergymen, obscure attorneys, who had formerly known
the most colourless of lives, were suddenly made the equals of
the most powerful tyrants of history. Guillotining, drowning,
shooting without mercy, at the hazard of their fancy, they were
raised from their former humble condition to the level of the
most celebrated potentates.
Never did Nero or Heliogabalus surpass in tyranny the
representatives of the Convention. Laws and customs always
restrained the former to a certain extent. Nothing restrained
the commissaries.
“Fouché,” writes Taine, “lorgnette in
hand, watched the butchery of 210 inhabitants of Lyons from his
window. Collot, Laporte, and Fouché feasted on days of
execution (fusillades), and at the sound of each discharge
sprang up with cries of joy, waving their hats.”
Among the representatives “on mission” who exhibit
this murderous mentality we may cite as a type the ex-curé
Lebon, who, having become possessed of supreme power, ravaged
Arras and Cambrai . His example, with that of Carrier,
contributes to show what man can become when he escapes from the
yoke of law and tradition. The cruelty of the ferocious
commissary was complicated by Sadism; the scaffold was raised
under his windows, so that he, his wife, and his helpers could
rejoice in the carnage. At the foot of the guillotine a
drinking-booth was established where the sans-culottes
could
come to drink. To amuse them the executioner would group on the
pavement, in ridiculous attitudes, the naked bodies of the
decapitated.
“The reading of the two volumes of his trial, printed
at Amiens in 1795, may be counted as a nightmare. During twenty
sessions the survivors of the hecatombs of Arras and Cambrai
passed through the ancient hall of the bailiwick at Amiens, where
the ex-member of the Convention was tried. What these phantoms
in mourning related is unheard of. Entire streets dispeopled;
nonagenarians and girls of sixteen decapitated after a mockery of
a trial; death buffeted, insulted, adorned, rejoiced in;
executions to music; battalions of children recruited to
guard the scaffold; the debauchery, the cynicism, the
refinements of an insane satrap; a romance by Sade turned epic;
it seems, as we watch the unpacking of these horrors, that
a whole country, long terrorised, is at last disgorging
its terror and revenging itself for its cowardice by
overwhelming the wretch there, the scapegoat of an abhorred
and vanished system.”
The only defence of the ex-clergyman was that he had
obeyed orders. The facts with which he was reproached had long
been known, and the Convention had in no wise blamed him for
them.
I have already spoken of the vanity of the deputies
“on mission,” who were suddenly endowed with a power
greater than that of the most powerful despots; but this vanity
is not enough to explain their ferocity.
That arose from other sources. Apostles of a severe
faith, the delegates of the Convention, like the inquisitors of
the Holy Office, could feel, can have felt, no pity for their
victims. Freed, moreover,
from all the bonds of tradition and law, they could give rein to
the most savage instincts that primitive animality has left in
us.
Civilisation restrains these instincts, but they never
die. The need to kill which makes the hunter is a permanent
proof of this. M. Cunisset-Carnot has expressed in the following
lines the grip of this hereditary tendency, which, in the pursuit
of the most harmless game, re-awakens the barbarian in every
hunter:—
“The pleasure of killing for killing's sake is, one
may say, universal; it is the basis of the hunting instinct, for
it must be admitted that at present, in civilised countries, the
need to live no longer counts for anything in its propagation.
In reality we are continuing an action which was imperiously
imposed upon our savage ancestors by the harsh necessities of
existence, during which they had either to kill or die of hunger,
while to-day there is no longer any legitimate excuse for it.
But so it is, and we can do nothing; probably we shall never
break the chains of a slavery which has bound us for so long. We
cannot prevent ourselves from feeling an intense, often
passionate, pleasure in shedding the blood of animals towards
whom, when the love of the chase possesses us, we lose all
feeling of pity. The gentlest and prettiest creatures, the song-
birds, the charm of our springtime, fall to our guns or are
choked in our snares, and not a shudder of pity troubles our
pleasure at seeing them terrified, bleeding, writhing in the
horrible suffering we inflict on them, seeking to flee on their
poor broken paws or desperately beating their wings, which can no
longer support them. . . . The
excuse is the impulse of that imperious atavism which the best of
us have not the strength to resist.”
At ordinary times this singular atavism, restrained by
fear of the laws, can only be exercised on animals. When codes
are no longer operative it immediately applies itself to man,
which is why so many terrorists took an intense pleasure in
killing. Carrier's remark concerning the joy he felt in
contemplating the faces of his victims during their torment is
very typical. In many civilised men ferocity is a restrained
instinct, but it is by no means eliminated.
