2. The Government of France during the Convention—The
Terror.
As soon as it assembled in 1792 the Convention began by
decreeing the abolition of royalty, and in spite of the
hesitation of a great number of its members, who knew that the
provinces were royalist, it proclaimed the Republic.
Intimately persuaded that such a proclamation would
transform the civilised world, it instituted a new era and a new
calendar. The year I. of this era marked the dawn of a world in
which reason alone was to reign. It was inaugurated by the trial
of Louis XVI., a measure which was ordered by the Commune, but
which the majority of the Convention did not desire.
At its outset, in fact, the Convention was governed by its
relatively moderate elements, the Girondists. The president and
the secretaries had been chosen among the best known of this
party. Robespierre, who was later to become the absolute master
of the Convention, possessed so little influence at this time
that he obtained only six votes for the presidency, while
Pétion received two hundred and thirty-five.
The Montagnards had at first only a very slight influence.
Their power was of later growth. When they were in power there
was no longer room in the Convention for moderate members.
Despite their minority the Montagnards found a way to
force the Assembly to bring Louis to trial. This was at once a
victory over the Girondists, the condemnation of all kings, and a
final divorce between the old order and the new.
To bring about the trial they manœuvred very
skilfully, bombarding the Convention with petitions from the
provinces, and sending a deputation from the insurrectional
Commune of Paris, which demanded a trial.
According to a characteristic common to the Assemblies of
the Revolution, that of yielding to threats and always doing the
contrary of what they wished, the men of the Convention dared not
resist. The trial was decided upon.
The Girondists, who individually would not have wished for
the death of the king, voted for it out of fear once they were
assembled. Hoping to save his own head, the Duc d'Orleans,
Louis' cousin, voted with them. If, on mounting the scaffold on
January 21, 1793, Louis had had that vision of the future which
we attribute to the gods, he would have seen following him, one
by one, the greater number of the Girondists whose weakness had
been unable to defend him.
Regarded only from the purely utilitarian point of view,
the execution of the king was one of the mistakes of the
Revolution. It engendered civil war and armed Europe against
France. In the Convention itself his death gave rise to
intestine struggles, which finally led to the triumph of the
Montagnards and the expulsion of the Girondists.
The measures passed under the influence of the Montagnards
finally became so despotic that sixty departments, comprising the
West and the South, revolted. The insurrection, which was headed
by many of the expelled deputies, would perhaps have succeeded
had not the compromising assistance of the royalists caused men
to fear the return of the ancien
régime. At Toulon, in fact, the insurgents
acclaimed Louis XVII.
The civil war thus begun lasted during the greater part of
the life of the Revolution. It was fought with the utmost
savagery. Old men, women, children, all were massacred, and
villages and crops were burned. In the Vendée alone the
number of the killed was reckoned at something between half a
million and a million.
Civil war was soon followed by foreign war. The Jacobins
thought to remedy all these ills by creating a new Constitution.
It was always a tradition with all the revolutionary assemblies
to believe in the magic virtues of formula. In France this
conviction has never been affected by the failure of experiments.
“A robust faith,” writes one of the great admirers
of the Revolution, M. Rambaud, “sustained the Convention in
this labour; it believed firmly that when it had formulated in a
law the principles of the Revolution its enemies would be
confounded, or, still better, converted, and that the advent of
justice would disarm the insurgents.”
During its lifetime the Convention drafted two
Constitutions—that of 1793, or the year I., and that of 1795, or
the year III. The first was never applied, an absolute
dictatorship very soon replacing it; the second created the
Directory.
The Convention contained a large number of lawyers and men
of affairs, who promptly comprehended the impossibility of
government by means of a large Assembly. They soon divided the
Convention into small committees, each of which had an
independent existence—business committees,
committees of legislation, finance, agriculture, arts, &c. These
committees prepared the laws which the Assembly usually voted
with its eyes closed.
Thanks to them, the work of the Convention was not purely
destructive. They drafted many very useful measures, creating
important colleges, establishing the metric system, &c. The
majority of the members of the Assembly, as we have already seen,
took refuge in these committees in order to evade the political
conflict which would have endangered their heads.
Above the business committees, which had nothing to do
with politics, was the Committee of Public Safety, instituted in
April, 1793, and composed of nine members. Directed at first by
Danton, and in the July of the same year by Robespierre, it
gradually absorbed all the powers of government, including that
of giving orders to ministers and generals. Carnot directed the
operations of the war, Cambon the finances, and Saint-Just and
Collot-d'Herbois the general policy.
Although the laws voted by the technical committees were
often very wise, and constituted the lasting work of the
Convention, those which the Assembly voted in a body under the
threats of the delegations which invaded it were manifestly
ridiculous.
Among these laws, which were not greatly in the interests
of the public or of the Convention itself, were the law of the
maximum, voted in September, 1793, which pretended to fix the
price of provisions, and which merely established a continual
dearth; the destruction of the royal tombs at Saint-Denis; the
trial of the queen, the systematic devastation of the
Vendée by fire, the establishment of the Revolutionary
Tribunal, &c.
The Terror was the chief means of government during the
Convention. Commencing in September, 1793, it reigned for six
months—that is, until the death of Robespierre. Vainly did
certain Jacobins— Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Hérault de
Séchelles, &c.—propose that clemency should be given a
trial. The only result of this proposition was that its authors
were sent to the scaffold. It was merely the lassitude of the
public that finally put an end to this shameful period.
The successive struggles of the various parties in the
Convention and its tendency towards extremes eliminated one by
one the men of importance who had once played their part therein.
Finally it fell under the exclusive domination of Robespierre.
While the Convention was disorganising and ravaging France, the
armies were winning brilliant victories. They had seized the
left bank of the Rhine, Belgium, and Holland. The treaty of
Basle ratified these conquests.
We have already mentioned, and we shall return to the
matter again, that the work of the armies must be considered
absolutely apart from that of the Convention. Contemporaries
understood this perfectly, but to-day it is often forgotten.
When the Convention was dissolved, in 1795, after lasting
for three years, it was regarded with universal distrust. The
perpetual plaything of popular caprice, it had not succeeded in
pacifying France, but had plunged her into anarchy. The
general opinion respecting the Convention is well summed up in a
letter written in July, 1799, by the Swedish
chargé
d'affaires, Baron Drinkmann: “I venture to hope that no
people will ever be governed by the will of more cruel and
imbecile scoundrels than those that have ruled France since the
beginning of her new liberty.”
