3. Mental Characteristics of the Convention.
Beside the characteristics common to all assemblies there are
some created by influences of environment and circumstances,
which give any particular assembly of men a special physiognomy.
Most of the characteristics observable in the Constituent and
Legislative Assemblies reappeared, in an exaggerated form, in the
Convention.
This Assembly comprised about seven hundred and fifty
deputies, of whom rather more than a third had sat in the
Constituent or the Legislative Assembly. By terrorising the
population the Jacobins contrived to triumph at the elections.
The majority of the electors, six millions out of seven,
preferred to abstain from voting.
As to the professions, the Assembly contained a large
number of lawyers, advocates, notaries, bailiffs, ex-magistrates,
and a few literary men.
The mentality of the Convention was not homogeneous. Now,
an assembly composed of individuals of widely different
characters soon splits up into a number of groups. The
Convention very early contained three—the Gironde, the Mountain,
and the Plain. The constitutional monarchists had almost
disappeared.
The Gironde and the Mountain, extreme parties, consisted
of about a hundred members apiece, who successively became
leaders. In the Mountain were the most advanced members:
Couthon, Hérault de Séchelles, Danton, Camille
Desmoulins, Marat, Collot d'Herbois, Billaud-Varennes, Barras,
Saint-Just, Fouché, Tallien, Carrier, Robespierre, &c. In
the Gironde were Brissot, Pétion, Condorcet, Vergniaud,
&c.
The five hundred other members of the Assembly—that is,
the great majority—constituted what was known as the Plain.
This latter formed a floating mass, silent, undecided, and
timid; ready to follow every impulse and to be carried away by
the excitement of the moment. It gave ear indifferently to the
stronger of the two preceding groups. After obeying the Gironde
for some time it allowed itself to be led away by the Mountain,
when the latter triumphed over its enemy. This was a natural
consequence of the law already stated, by which the weak
invariably fall under the dominion of the stronger wills.
The influence of great manipulators of men was
displayed in a high degree during the Convention. It was
constantly led by a violent minority of narrow minds, whose
intense convictions lent them great strength.
A brutal and audacious minority will always lead a fearful
and irresolute majority. This explains the constant tendency
toward extremes to be observed in all revolutionary assemblies.
The history of the Convention verifies once more the law of
acceleration studied in another chapter.
The men of the Convention were thus bound to pass from
moderation to greater and greater violence. Finally they
decimated themselves. Of the 180 Girondists who at the outset
led the Convention 140 were killed or fled, and finally the most
fanatical of the Terrorists, Robespierre, reigned alone over a
terrified crowd of servile representatives.
Yet it was among the five hundred members of the majority,
uncertain and floating as it was, that the intelligence and
experience were to be found. The technical committees to whom
the useful work of the Convention was due were recruited from the
Plain.
More or less indifferent to politics, the members of the
Plain were chiefly anxious that no one should pay particular
attention to them. Shut up in their committees, they showed
themselves as little as possible in the Assembly, which explains
why the sessions of the Convention contained barely a third of
the deputies.
Unhappily, as often happens, these intelligent and honest
men were completely devoid of character, and the fear which
always dominated them made them
vote for the worst of the measures introduced by their dreaded
masters.
The men of the Plain voted for everything they were
ordered to vote for—the creation of the Revolutionary Tribunal,
the Terror, &c. It was with their assistance that the Mountain
crushed the Gironde, and Robespierre destroyed the
Hébertists and Dantonists. Like all weak people, they
followed the strong. The gentle philanthropists who composed the
Plain, and constituted the majority of the Assembly, contributed,
by their pusillanimity, to bring about the frightful excesses of
the Convention.
The psychological note always prevailing in the Convention
was a horrible fear. It was more especially through fear that
men cut off one another's heads, in the doubtful hope of keeping
their own on their shoulders.
Such a fear was, of course, very comprehensible. The
unhappy deputies deliberated amid the hootings and vociferations
of the tribunes. At every moment veritable savages, armed with
pikes, invaded the Assembly, and the majority of the members no
longer dared to attend the sessions. When by chance they did go
it was only to vote in silence according to the orders of the
Mountain, which was only a third as numerous.
The fear which dominated the latter, although less
visible, was just as profound. Men destroyed their enemies, not
only because they were shallow fanatics, but because they were
convinced that their own existence was threatened. The judges of
the revolutionary Tribunals trembled no less. They would have
willingly acquitted Danton, and the widow
of Camille Desmoulins, and many others. They dared not.
But it was above all when Robespierre became the sole
master that the phantom of fear oppressed the Assembly. It has
truly been said that a glance from the master made his colleagues
shrink with fear. On their faces one read “the pallor of
fear and the abandon of despair.”
All feared Robespierre and Robespierre feared all. It was
because he feared conspiracies against him that he cut off men's
heads, and it was also through fear that others allowed him to do
so.
The memoirs of members of the Convention show plainly what
a horrible memory they retained of this gloomy period.
Questioned twenty years later, says Taine, on the true aim and
the intimate thoughts of the Committee of Public Safety,
Barrère replied:—
“We had only one feeling, that of self-preservation;
only one desire, that of preserving our lives, which each of us
believed to be threatened. You had your neighbour's head cut off
so that your neighbour should not have you yourself
guillotined.”
The history of the Convention constitutes one of the most
striking examples that could be given of the influence of leaders
and of fear upon an assembly.
