4. Fouquier-Tinville, Marat, Billaud-Varenne,
&c.
I shall devote a paragraph to certain revolutionists who were
famous for the development of their most sanguinary instincts.
Their ferocity was complicated
by other sentiments, by fear and hatred, which could but fortify
it.
Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor of the
Revolutionary Tribunal, was one of those who have left the most
sinister memories. This magistrate, formerly reputed for his
kindness, and who became the bloodthirsty creature whose memory
evokes such repulsion, has already served me as an example in
other works, when I have wished to show the transformation of
certain natures in time of revolution.
Needy in the extreme at the moment of the fall of the
monarchy, he had everything to hope from a social upheaval and
nothing to lose. He was one of those men whom a period of
disorder will always find ready to sustain it.
The Convention abandoned its powers to him. He had to
pronounce upon the fate of nearly two thousand accused, among
whom were Marie-Antoinette, the Girondists, Danton,
Hébert, &c. He had all the suspects brought before him
executed, and did not scruple to betray his former protectors.
As soon as one of them fell into his power—Camille Desmoulins,
Danton, or another—he would plead against him.
Fouquier-Tinville had a very inferior mind, which the
Revolution brought to the top. Under normal conditions, hedged
about by professional rules, his destiny would have been that of
a peaceable and obscure magistrate. This was precisely the lot
of his deputy, or substitute, at the Tribunal, Gilbert-Liendon.
“He should,” writes M. Durel, “have inspired the same
horror as his colleague, yet he completed his career in the upper
ranks of the Imperial magistracy.”
One of the great benefits of an organised society is that
it does restrain these dangerous characters, whom nothing but
social restraints can hold.
Fouquier-Tinville died without understanding why he was
condemned, and from the revolutionary point of view his
condemnation was not justifiable. Had he not merely zealously
executed the orders of his superiors? It is impossible to class
him with the representatives who were sent into the provinces,
who could not be supervised. The delegates of the Convention
examined all his sentences and approved of them up to the last.
If his cruelty and his summary fashion of trying the prisoners
before him had not been encouraged by his chiefs, he could not
have remained in power. In condemning Fouquier-Tinville, the
Convention condemned its own frightful system of government. It
understood this fact, and sent to the scaffold a number of
Terrorists whom Fouquier-Tinville had merely served as a faithful
agent.
Beside Fouquier-Tinville we may set Dumas, who presided
over the Revolutionary Tribunal, and who also displayed an
excessive cruelty, which was whetted by an intense fear. He
never went out without two loaded pistols, barricaded himself in
his house, and only spoke to visitors through a wicket. His
distrust of everybody, including his own wife, was absolute. He
even imprisoned the latter, and was about to have her executed
when Thermidor arrived.
Among the men whom the Convention brought to light,
Billaud-Varenne was one of the wildest and, most brutal. He may
be regarded as a perfect type of bestial ferocity.
“In these hours of fruitful anger and heroic anguish
he remained calm, acquitting himself methodically of his task—
and it was a frightful task: he appeared officially at the
massacres of the Abbaye, congratulated the assassins, and
promised them money; upon which he went home as if he had merely
been taking a walk. We see him as president of the Jacobin Club,
president of the Convention, and member of the Committee of
Public Safety; he drags the Girondists to the scaffold: he drags
the queen thither, and his former patron, Danton, said of him,
`Billaud has a dagger under his tongue.' He approves of the
cannonades at Lyons, the drownings at Nantes, the massacres at
Arras; he organises the pitiless commission of Orange; he is
concerned in the laws of Prairial; he eggs on Fouquier-Tinville;
on all decrees of death is his name, often the first; he signs
before his colleagues; he is without pity, without emotion,
without enthusiasm; when others are frightened, hesitate, and
draw back, he goes his way, speaking in turgid sentences,
`shaking his lion's mane'—for to make his cold and impassive
face more in harmony with the exuberance that surrounds him he
now decks himself in a yellow wig which would make one laugh were
it on any but the sinister head of Billaud-Varenne. When
Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Couthon are threatened in turn, he
deserts them and goes over to the enemy, and pushes them under
the knife. . . . Why? What is his aim? No one knows; he is not
in any way ambitious; he desires neither power nor money.”
I do not think it would be difficult to answer why. The
thirst for blood, of which we have already spoken, and which is
very common among certain criminals,
perfectly explains the conduct of Billaud-Varennes. Bandits of
this type kill for the sake of killing, as sportsmen shoot game—
for the very pleasure of exercising their taste for destruction.
In ordinary times men endowed with these homicidal tendencies
refrain, generally from fear of the policeman and the scaffold.
When they are able to give them free vent nothing can stop them.
Such was the case with Billaud-Varenne and many others.
The psychology of Marat is rather more complicated, not
only because his craving for murder was combined with other
elements—wounded self-love, ambition, mystic beliefs, &c.—but
also because we must regard him as a semi-lunatic, affected by
megalomania, and haunted by fixed ideas.
Before the Revolution he had advanced great scientific
pretensions, but no one attached much importance to his
maunderings. Dreaming of place and honour, he had only obtained
a very subordinate situation in the household of a great noble.
The Revolution opened up an unhoped-for future. Swollen with
hatred of the old social system which had not recognised his
merits, he put himself at the head of the most violent section of
the people. Having publicly glorified the massacres of
September, he founded a journal which denounced everybody and
clamoured incessantly for executions.
Speaking continually of the interests of the people, Marat
became their idol. The majority of his colleagues heartily
despised him. Had he escaped the knife of Charlotte Corday, he
certainly would not have escaped that of the guillotine.
5.
The Destiny of those Members of the Convention who
survived the Revolution.
Beside the members of the Convention whose psychology
presents particular characteristics there were others—Barras,
Fouché, Tallien, Merlin de Thionville, &c.—completely
devoid of principles or belief, who only sought to enrich
themselves.
They sought to build up enormous fortunes out of the
public misery. In ordinary times they would have been qualified
as simple scoundrels, but in perods of revolution all
standards of vice and virtue seem to disappear.
Although a few Jacobins remained fanatics, the majority
renounced their convictions as soon as they had obtained riches,
and became the faithful courtiers of Napoleon.
Cambacérès, who, on addressing Louis XVI. in
prison, called him Louis Capet, under the Empire required his
friends to call him “Highness” in public and
“Monseigneur” in private, thus displaying the envious
feeling which accompanied the craving for equality in many of the
Jacobins.
“The majority of the Jacobins,” writes M. Madelin
“were greatly enriched, and like Chabot, Bazire, Merlin,
Barras, Boursault, Tallien, Barrère, &c., possessed
châteaux and estates. Those who were not wealthy as
yet were soon to become so. . . In the Committee of the year
III. alone the staff of the Thermidorian party comprised a future
prince, 13 future counts, 5 future barons, 7 future senators of
the Empire, and 6 future Councillors of State, and beside them in
the Convention there were, between the future Duke of Otranto to
the future Count Regnault, no less than
50 democrats who fifteen years later possessed titles, coats of
arms, plumes, carriages, endowments, entailed estates, hotels,
and
châteaux. Fouché died worth
£600,000.”
The privileges of the ancien régime which
had been so bitterly decried were thus very soon re-established
for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. To arrive at this
result it was necessary to ruin France, to burn entire provinces,
to multiply suffering, to plunge innumerable families into
despair, to overturn Europe, and to destroy men by the hundred
thousand on the field of battle.
In closing this chapter we will recall what we have
already said concerning the possibility of judging the men of
this period.
Although the moralist is forced to deal severely with
certain individuals, because he judges them by the types which
society must respect if it is to succeed in maintaining itself,
the psychologist is not in the same case. His aim is to
understand, and criticism vanishes before a complete
comprehension.
The human mind is a very fragile mechanism, and the
marionettes which dance upon the stage of history are rarely able
to resist the imperious forces which impel them. Heredity,
environment, and circumstances are imperious masters. No one can
say with certainty what would have been his conduct in the place
of the men whose actions he endeavours to interpret.
