3. Danton and Robespierre.
Danton and Robespierre represented the two principal
personages of the Revolution I shall say little of the former:
his psychology, besides being simple, is familiar. A club orator
firstly, impulsive and violent, he showed himself always ready to
excite the people. Cruel only in his speeches, he often
regretted their effects. From the outset he shone in the first
rank, while his future rival, Robespierre, was vegetating almost
in the lowest.
At one given moment Danton became the soul of the
Revolution, but he was deficient in tenacity and fixity of
conduct. Moreover, he was needy, while Robespierre was not. The
continuous fanaticism of the latter defeated the intermittent
efforts of the former. Nevertheless, it was an amazing spectacle
to see so powerful a tribune sent to the scaffold by his pale,
venemous enemy and mediocre rival.
Robespierre, the most influential man of the Revolution
and the most frequently studied, is yet the least explicable. It
is difficult to understand the
prodigious influence which gave him the power of life and death,
not only over the enemies of the Revolution but also over
colleagues who could not have been considered as enemies of the
existing Government.
We certainly cannot explain the matter by saying with
Taine that Robespierre was a pedant lost in abstractions, nor by
asserting with the Michelet that he succeeded on account of his
principles, nor by repeating with his contemporary Williams that
“one of the secrets of his government was to take men marked
by opprobrium or soiled with crime as stepping-stones to his
ambition.”
It is impossible to regard his eloquence as the cause of
his success. His eyes protected by goggles, he painfully read
his speeches, which were composed of cold and indefinite
abstractions. The Assembly contained orators who possessed an
immensely superior talent, such as Danton and the Girondists; yet
it was Robespierre who destroyed them.
We have really no acceptable explanation of the ascendancy
which the dictator finally obtained. Without influence in the
National Assembly, he gradually became the master of the
Convention and of the Jacobins. “When he reached the
Committee of Public Safety he was already,” said Billaud—
Varennes, “the most important person in France.”
“His history,” writes Michelet, “is
prodigious, far more marvellous than that of Bonaparte. The
threads, the wheels, the preparation of forces, are far less
visible. It is an honest man, an austere but pious figure, of
middling talents, that shoots up one morning, borne upward by I
know not what cataclysm. There is nothing like it in the
Arabian
Nights. And in a moment he goes higher than the throne.
He is set upon the altar. Astonishing story!”
Certainly circumstances helped him considerably. People
turned to him as to the master of whom all felt the need. But
then he was already there, and what we wish to discover is the
cause of his rapid ascent. I would willingly suppose in him the
existence of a species of personal fascination which escapes us
to-day. His successes with women might be quoted in support of
this theory. On the days when he speaks “the passages are
choked with women . . . there are seven or eight hundred in the
tribunes, and with what transports they applaud! At the
Jacobins, when he speaks there are sobs and cries of emotion, and
men stamp as though they would bring the hall down.” A young
widow, Mme. de Chalabre, possessed of sixteen hundred pounds a
year, sends him burning love-letters and is eager to marry him.
We cannot seek in his character for the causes of his
popularity. A hypochondriac by temperament, of mediocre
intelligence, incapable of grasping realities, confined to
abstractions, crafty and dissimulating, his prevailing note was
an excessive pride which increased until his last day. High
priest of a new faith, he believed himself sent on earth by God
to establish the reign of virtue. He received writings stating
“that he was the Messiah whom the Eternal Being had promised
to reform the world.”
Full of literary pretensions, he laboriously polished his
speeches. His profound jealousy of other orators or men of
letters, such as Camille Desmoulins, caused their death.
“Those who were particularly the objects of the
tyrant's rage,” writes the author already cited, “were
the men of letters. With regard to them the jealousy of a
colleague was mingled with the fury of the oppressor; for the
hatred with which he persecuted them was caused less by their
resistance to his despotism than by their talents, which eclipsed
his.”
The contempt of the dictator for his colleagues was
immense and almost unconcealed. Giving audience to Barras at the
hour of his toilet, he finished shaving, spitting in the
direction of his colleague as though he did not exist, and
disdaining to reply to his questions.
He regarded the bourgeoisie and the deputies with
the same hateful disdain. Only the multitude found grace in his
eyes. “When the sovereign people exercises its power,”
he said, “we can only bow before it. In all it does all is
virtue and truth, and no excess, error, or crime is
possible.”
Robespierre suffered from the persecution mania. That he
had others' heads cut off was not only because he had a mission
as an apostle, but because he believed himself hemmed in by
enemies and conspirators. “Great as was the cowardice of his
colleagues where he was concerned,” writes M. Sorel, “the
fear he had of them was still greater.”
His dictatorship, absolute during five months, is a
striking example of the power of certain leaders. We can
understand that a tyrant backed by an army can easily destroy
whom he pleases, but that a single man should succeed in sending
to death a large number of his equals is a thing that is not
easily explained.
The power of Robespierre was so absolute that he was able
to send to the Tribunal, and therefore to the scaffold, the most
eminent deputies: Desmoulins, Hébert, Danton, and many
another. The brilliant Girondists melted away before him. He
attacked even the terrible Commune, guillotined its leaders, and
replaced it by a new Commune obedient to his orders.
In order to rid himself more quickly of the men who
displeased him he induced the Convention to enact the law of
Prairial, which permitted the execution of mere suspects, and by
means of which he had 1,373 heads cut off in Paris in forty-nine
days. His colleagues, the victims of an insane terror, no longer
slept at home; scarcely a hundred deputies were present at
sessions. David said: “I do not believe twenty of us
members of the Mountain will be left.”
It was his very excess of confidence in his own powers and
in the cowardice of the Convention that lost Robespierre his
life. Having attempted to make them vote a measure which would
permit deputies to be sent before the Revolutionary Tribunal,
which meant the scaffold, without the authorisation of the
Assembly, on an order from the governing Committee, several
Montagnards conspired with some members of the Plain to overthrow
him. Tallien, knowing himself marked down for early execution,
and having therefore nothing to lose, accused him loudly of
tyranny. Robespierre wished to defend himself by reading a
speech which he had long had in hand, but he learned to his cost
that although it is possible to destroy men in the name of logic
it is not possible to
lead an assembly by means of logic. The shouts of the
conspirators drowned his voice; the cry “Down with the
tyrant!” quickly repeated, thanks to mental contagion, by
many of the members present, was enough to complete his downfall.
Without losing a moment the Assembly decreed his accusation.
The Commune having wished to save him, the Assembly
outlawed him. Struck by this magic formula, he was definitely
lost.
“This cry of outlawry,” writes Williams, “at
this period produced the same effect on a Frenchman as the cry of
pestilence; the outlaw became civilly excommunicated, and it was
as though men believed that they would be contaminated passing
through the air which he had breathed. Such was the effect it
produced upon the gunners who had trained their cannon against
the Convention. Without receiving further orders, merely on
hearing that the Commune was `outside the law,' they immediately
turned their batteries about.”
Robespierre and all his band—Saint-Just, the president of
the Revolutionary Tribunal, the mayor of the Commune, &c.,—were
guillotined on the 10th of Thermidor to the number of twenty-one.
Their execution was followed on the morrow by a fresh batch of
seventy Jacobins, and on the next day by thirteen. The Terror,
which had lasted ten months, was at an end.
The downfall of the Jacobin edifice in Thermidor is one of
the most curious psychological events of the revolutionary
period. None of the Montagnards who had worked for the downfall
of Robespierre had for a moment dreamed that it would mark the
end of the Terror.
Tallien, Barras, Fouché, &c., overthrew Robespierre
as he had overthrown Hébert, Danton, the Girondists, and
many others. But when the acclamations of the crowd told them
that the death of Robespierre was regarded as having put an end
to the Terror they acted as though such had been their intention.
They were the more obliged to do so in that the Plain—that is,
the great majority of the Assembly—which had allowed itself to
be decimated by Robespierre, now rebelled furiously against the
system it had so long acclaimed even while it abhorred it.
Nothing is more terrible than a body of men who have been afraid
and are afraid no longer. The Plain revenged itself for being
terrorised by the Mountain, and terrorised that body in turn.
The servility of the colleagues of Robespierre in the
Convention was by no means based upon any feeling of sympathy for
him. The dictator filled them with an unspeakable alarm, but
beneath the marks of admiration and enthusiasm which they
lavished on him out of fear was concealed an intense hatred. We
can gather as much by reading the reports of various deputies
inserted in the Moniteur of August 11, 15, and 29, 1794,
and notably that on “the conspiracy of the triumvirs,
Robespierre, Couthon, and Saint-Just.” Never did slaves heap
such invectives on a fallen master.
We learn that “these monsters had for some time been
renewing the most horrible prescriptions of Marius and
Sulla.” Robespierre is represented as a most frightful
scoundrel; we are assured that “like Caligula, he would soon
have asked the French people to worship his horse . . . He
sought security
in the execution of all who aroused his slightest suspicion.
These reports forget to add that the power of Robespierre
obtained no support, as did that of the Marius and Sulla to whom
they allude, from a powerful army, but merely from the repeated
adhesion of the members of the Convention. Without their extreme
timidity the power of the dictator could not have lasted a single
day.
Robespierre was one of the most odious tyrants of history,
but he is distinguished from all others in that he made himself a
tyrant without soldiers.
We may sum up his doctrines by saying that he was the most
perfect incarnation, save perhaps Saint-Just, of the Jacobin
faith, in all its narrow logic, its intense mysticism, and its
inflexible rigidity. He has admirers even to-day. M. Hamel
describes him as “the martyr of Thermidor.” There has
been some talk of erecting a monument to him. I would willingly
subscribe to such a purpose, feeling that it is useful to
preserve proofs of the blindness of the crowd, and of the
extraordinary docility of which an assembly is capable when the
leader knows how to handle it. His statue would recall the
passionate cries of admiration and enthusiasm with which the
Convention acclaimed the most threatening measures of the
dictator, on the very eve of the day when it was about to cast
him down.
