5. CHAPTER V
INSTANCES OF REVOLUTIONARY VIOLENCE
1. Psychological Causes of Revolutionary
Violence.
WE have shown in the course of the preceding chapters that the
revolutionary theories constituted a new faith.
Humanitarian and sentimental, they exalted liberty and
fraternity. But, as in many religions, we can observe a complete
contradiction between doctrine and action. In practice no
liberty was tolerated, and fraternity was quickly replaced by
frenzied massacres.
This opposition between principles and conduct results
from the intolerance which accompanies all beliefs. A religion
may be steeped in humanitarianism and forbearance, but its
sectaries will always want to impose it on others by force, so
that violence is the inevitable result.
The cruelties of the Revolution were thus the inherent
results of the propagation of the new dogmas. The Inquisition,
the religious wars of France, St. Bartholomew's Day, the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the “Dragonnades,” the
persecution of the Jansenists, &c., belonged to the same family
as the Terror and derived from the same psychological sources.
Louis XIV. was not a cruel king, yet under the
impulse of his faith he drove hundreds of thousands of
Protestants out of France, after first shooting down a
considerable number and sending others to the galleys.
The methods of persuasion adopted by all believers are by
no means a consequence of their fear of the dissentient
opposition. Protestants and Jansenists were anything but
dangerous under Louis XIV. Intolerance arises above all from the
indignation experienced by a mind which is convinced that it
possesses the most dazzling verities against the men who deny
those truths, and who are surely not acting in good faith. How
can one support error when one has the necessary strength to wipe
it out?
Thus have reasoned the believers of all ages. Thus
reasoned Louis XIV. and the men of the Terror. These latter also
were convinced that they were in possession of absolute truths,
which they believed to be obvious, and whose triumph was certain
to regenerate humanity. Could they be more tolerant toward their
adversaries than the Church and the kings of France had been
toward heretics?
We are forced to believe that terror is a method which all
believers regard as a necessity, since from the beginning of the
ages religious codes have always been based upon terror. To
force men to observe their prescriptions, believers have sought
to terrify them with threats of an eternal hell of torments.
The apostles of the Jacobin belief behaved as their
fathers had done, and employed the same methods. If similar
events occurred again we should see identical actions repeated.
If a new belief—Socialism, for example—were to triumph
tomorrow, it would be led
to employ methods of propaganda like those of the Inquisition and
the Terror.
But were we to regard the Jacobin Terror solely as the
result of a religious movement, we should not completely
apprehend it. Around a triumphant religious belief, as we saw in
the case of the Reformation, gather a host of individual
interests which are dependent on that belief. The Terror was
directed by a few fanatical apostles, but beside this small
number of ardent proselytes, whose narrow minds dreamed of
regenerating the world, were great numbers of men who lived only
to enrich themselves. They rallied readily around the first
victorious leader who promised to enable them to enjoy the
results of their pillage.
“The Terrorists of the Revolution,” writes Albert
Sorel, “resorted to the Terror because they wished to remain
in power, and were incapable of doing so by other means. They
employed it for their own salvation, and after the event they
stated that their motive was the salvation of the State. Before
it became a system it was a means of government, and the system
was only invented to justify the means.”
We may thus fully agree with the following verdict on the
Terror, written by Emile Ollivier in his work on the Revolution:
“The Terror was above all a Jacquerie, a regularised pillage,
the vastest enterprise of theft that any association of criminals
has ever organised.”
2. The Revolutionary Tribunals.
The Revolutionary Tribunals constituted the principal means of
action of the Terror. Besides that of Paris, created at the
instigation of Danton, and which
a year afterwards sent its founder to the guillotine, France was
covered with such tribunals.
“One hundred and seventy-eight tribunals,” says
Taine, “of which 40 were perambulant, pronounced death
sentences in all parts of the country, which were carried out
instantly on the spot. Between the 16th of April, 1793, and the
9th of Thermidor in the year II. that of Paris guillotined 2,625
persons, and the provincial judges worked as hard as those of
Paris. In the little town of Orange alone 331 persons were
guillotined. In the city of Arras 299 men and 93 women were
guillotined. . . . In the city of Lyons alone the revolutionary
commissioner admitted to 1,684 executions. . . . The total
number of these murders has been put at 17,000, among whom were
1,200 women, of whom a number were octogenarians.”
Although the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris claimed only
2,625 victims, it must not be forgotten that all the suspects had
already been summarily massacred during the “days” of
September.
The Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris, a mere instrument of
the Committee of Public Safety, limited itself in reality, as
Fouquier-Tinville justly remarked during his trial, to executing
its orders. It surrounded itself at first with a few legal forms
which did not long survive. Interrogatory, defence, witnesses—
all were finally suppressed. Moral proof—that is, mere
suspicion—sufficed to procure condemnation. The president
usually contented himself with putting a vague question to the
accused. To work more rapidly still, Fouquier-Tinville proposed
to have the guillotine installed on the same premises as the
Tribunal.
This Tribunal sent indiscriminately to the scaffold
all the accused persons arrested by reason of party hatred. and
very soon, in the hands of Robespierre, it constituted an
instrument of the bloodiest tyranny. When Danton, one of its
founders, became its victim, he justly asked pardon of God and
men, before mounting the scaffold for having assisted to create
such a Tribunal.
Nothing found mercy before it: neither the genius of
Lavoisier, nor the gentleness of Lucile Desmoulins, nor the merit
of Malesherbes. “So much talent,” said Benjamin
Constant, “massacred by the most cowardly and brutish of
men!”
To find any excuse for the Revolutionary Tribunal, we must
return to our conception of the religious mentality of the
Jacobins, who founded and directed it. It was a piece of work
comparable in its spirit and its aim to the Inquisition. The men
who furnished its victims—Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Couthon—
believed themselves the benefactors of the human race in
suppressing all infidels, the enemies of the faith that was to
regenerate the earth.
The executions during the Terror did not affect the
members of the aristocracy only, since 4,000 peasants and 3,000
working-men were guillotined.
Given the emotion produced in Paris in our days by a
capital execution, one might suppose that the execution of so
many persons at one time would produce a very great emotion. But
habit had so dulled sensibility that people paid but little
attention to the matter at last. Mothers would take their
children to see people guillotined as to-day they take them to
the marionette theatre.
The daily spectacle of executions made the men of
the time very indifferent to death. All mounted the scaffold
with perfect tranquillity, the Girondists singing the
Marseillaise as they climbed the steps.
This resignation resulted from the law of habitude, which
very rapidly dulls emotion. To judge by the fact that royalist
risings were taking place daily, the prospect of the guillotine
no longer terrified men. Things happened as though the Terror
terrorised no one. Terror is an efficacious psychological
process so long as it does not last. The real terror resides far
more in threats than in their realisation.
3. The Terror in the Provinces.
The executions of the Revolutionary Tribunals in the provinces
represented only a portion of the massacres effected in the
departments during the Terror. The revolutionary army, composed
of vagabonds and brigands, marched through France killing and
pillaging. Its method of procedure is well indicated by the
following passage from Taine:—
“At Bedouin, a town of 2,000 inhabitants, where
unknown hands had cut down the tree of liberty, 433 houses were
demolished or fired, 16 persons were guillotined, and 47 shot
down; all the other inhabitants were expelled and reduced to
living as vagabonds in the mountains, and to taking shelter in
caverns which they hollowed out of the earth.”
The fate of the wretches sent before the Revolutionary
Tribunals was no better. The first mockery of trial was quickly
suppressed. At Nantes, Carrier drowned and shot down according
to his fancy nearly 5,000 persons—men, women, and children.
The details of these massacres figured in the
Moniteur after the reaction of Thermidor. I cite a few
lines:—
“I saw,” says Thomas, “after the taking of
Noirmoutier, men and women and old people burned alive .
. . women violated, girls of fourteen and fifteen, and massacred
afterward, and tender babes thrown from bayonet to bayonet;
children who were taken from beside their mothers stretched out
on the ground.”
In the same number we read a deposition by one Julien,
relating how Carrier forced his victims to dig their graves and
to allow themselves to be buried alive. The issue of October 15,
1794, contained a report by Merlin de Thionville proving that the
captain of the vessel le Destin had received orders to
embark forty-one victims to be drowned—“among them a blind
man of 78, twelve women, twelve girls, and fourteen children, of
whom ten were from 10 to 6 and five at the breast.”
In the course of Carrier's trial (Moniteur,
December 30, 1794) it was proved that he “had given orders to
drown and shoot women and children, and had ordered General Haxo
to exterminate all the inhabitants of La Vendée and to
burn down their dwellings.”
Carrier, like all wholesale murderers, took an intense joy
in seeing his victims suffer. “In the department in which I
hunted the priests,” he said, “I have never laughed so
much or experienced such pleasure as in watching their dying
grimaces” (Moniteur, December 22, 1794).
Carrier was tried to satisfy the reaction of Thermidor.
But the massacres of Nantes were
repeated in many other towns. Fouché slew more than 2,000
persons at Lyons, and so many were killed at Toulon that the
population fell from 29,000 to 7,000 in a few months.
We must say in defence of Carrier, Fréron,
Fouché and all these sinister persons, that they were
incessantly stimulated by the Committee of Public Safety.
Carrier gave proof of this during his trial.
“I admit,” said he (Moniteur, December 24,
1794), “that 150 or 200 prisoners were shot every day, but it
was by order of the commission. I informed the Convention that
the brigands were being shot down by hundreds, and it applauded
this letter, and ordered its insertion in the Bulletin.
What were these deputies doing then who are so furious against me
now? They were applauding. Why did they still keep me `on
mission'? Because I was then the saviour of the country, and now
I am a bloodthirsty man.”
Unhappily for him, Carrier did not know, as he remarked in
the same speech, that only seven or eight persons led the
Convention. But the terrorised Assembly approved of all that
these seven or eight ordered, so that they could say nothing in
reply to Carrier's argument. He certainly deserved to be
guillotined, but the whole Convention deserved to be guillotined
with him, since it had approved of the massacres.
The defence of Carrier, justified by the letters of the
Committee, by which the representatives “on mission” were
incessantly stimulated, shows that the violence of the Terror
resulted from a system, and not, as has sometimes been claimed,
from the initiative of a few individuals.
The thirst for destruction during the Terror was by no
means assuaged by the destruction of human beings only; there was
an even greater destruction of inanimate things. The true
believer is always an iconoclast. Once in power, he destroys
with equal zeal the enemies of his faith and the images, temples,
and symbols which recall the faith attacked.
We know that the first action of the Emperor Theodosius
when converted to the Christian religion was to break down the
majority of the temples which for six thousand years had been
built beside the Nile. We must not, therefore, be surprised to
see the leaders of the Revolution attacking the monuments and
works of art which for them were the vestiges of an abhorred
past.
Statues, manuscripts, stained glass windows, and plate
were frenziedly broken. When Fouché, the future Duke of
Otranto under Napoleon, and minister under Louis XVIII., was sent
as commissary of the Convention to the Nievre, he ordered the
demolition of all the towers of the châteaux and the
belfries of the churches “because they wounded equality.”
Revolutionary vandalism expended itself even on the tomb.
Following a report read by Barrère to the Convention, the
magnificent royal tombs at Saint-Denis, among which was the
admirable mausoleum of Henri II., by Germain Pilon, were smashed
to pieces, the coffins emptied, and the body of Turenne sent to
the Museum as a curiosity, after one of the keepers had extracted
the teeth in order to sell them as curiosities. The moustache
and beard of Henri IV. were also torn out.
It is impossible to witness such comparatively
enlightened men consenting to the destruction of the artistic
patriotism of France without a feeling of sadness. To excuse
them, we must remember that intense beliefs give rise to the
worst excesses, and also that the Convention, almost daily
invaded by rioters, always yielded to the popular will.
This glowing record of devastation proves, not only the
power of fanaticism: it shows us what becomes of men who are
liberated from all social restraints, and of the country which
falls into their hands.
