University of Virginia Library

7. CHAPTER VII
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE LEADERS OF THE REVOLUTION

1. Mentality of the Men of the Revolution. The respective Influence of Violent and Feeble Characters.

MEN judge with their intelligence, and are guided by their characters. To understand a man fully one must separate these two elements.

During the great periods of activity—and the revolutionary movements naturally belong to such periods— character always takes the first rank.

Having in several chapters described the various mentalities which predominate in times of disturbance, we need not return to the subject now. They constitute general types which are naturally modified by each man's inherited and acquired personality.

We have seen what an important part was played by the mystic element in the Jacobin mentality, and the ferocious fanaticism to which it led the sectaries of the new faith.

We have also seen that all the members of the Assemblies were not fanatics. These latter were even in the minority, since in the most sanguinary of the revolutionary assemblies the great majority was composed of timid and moderate men of neutral character. Before Thermidor the members of this

group voted from fear with the violent and after Thermidor with the moderate deputies.

In time of revolution, as at other times, these neutral characters, obeying the most contrary impulses, are always the most numerous. They are also as dangerous in reality as the violent characters. The force of the latter is supported by the weakness of the former.

In all revolutions, and in particularly in the French Revolution, we observe a small minority of narrow but decided minds which imperiously dominate an immense majority of men who are often very intelligent but are lacking in character

Besides the fanatical apostles and the feeble characters, a revolution always produces individuals who merely think how to profit thereby. These were numerous during the French Revolution. Their aim was simply to utilise circumstances so as to enrich themselves. Such were Barras, Tallien, Fouché, Barrère, and many more. Their politics consisted simply in serving the strong against the weak.

From the outset of the Revolution these “arrivists,” as one would call them to-day, were numerous. Camille Desmoulins wrote in 1792: “Our Revolution has its roots only in the egotism and self-love of each individual, of the combination of which the general interest is composed.”

If we add to these indications the observations contained in another chapter concerning the various forms of mentality to be observed in times of political upheaval, we shall obtain a general idea of the character of the men of the Revolution. We shall now apply the principles already expounded to the

most remarkable personages of the revolutionary period.

2. Psychology of the Commissaries or Representatives “on Mission.”

In Paris the conduct of the members of the Convention was always directed, restrained, or excited by the action of their colleagues, and that of their environment.

To judge them properly we should observe them when left to themselves and uncontrolled, when they possessed full liberty. Such were the representatives who were sent “on mission” into the departments by the Convention.

The power of these delegates was absolute. No censure embarrassed them. Functionaries and magistrates had perforce to obey them.

A representative “on mission” “requisitions,” sequestrates, or confiscates as seems good to him; taxes, imprisons, deports, or decapitates as he thinks fit, and in his own district he is a pasha.”

Regarding themselves as “pashas,” they displayed themselves “drawn in carriages with six horses, surrounded by guards; sitting at sumptuous tables with thirty covers, eating to the sound of music, with a following of players, courtezans, and mercenaries. . . .” At Lyons “the solemn appearance of Collot d'Herbois is like that of the Grand Turk. No one can come into his presence without three repeated requests; a string of apartments precedes his reception-room, and no one approaches nearer than fifteen paces.”

One can picture the immense vanity of these

dictators as they solemly entered the towns, surrounded by guards, men whose gesture was enough to cause heads to fall.

Petty lawyers without clients, doctors without patients, unfrocked clergymen, obscure attorneys, who had formerly known the most colourless of lives, were suddenly made the equals of the most powerful tyrants of history. Guillotining, drowning, shooting without mercy, at the hazard of their fancy, they were raised from their former humble condition to the level of the most celebrated potentates.

Never did Nero or Heliogabalus surpass in tyranny the representatives of the Convention. Laws and customs always restrained the former to a certain extent. Nothing restrained the commissaries.

“Fouché,” writes Taine, “lorgnette in hand, watched the butchery of 210 inhabitants of Lyons from his window. Collot, Laporte, and Fouché feasted on days of execution (fusillades), and at the sound of each discharge sprang up with cries of joy, waving their hats.”

Among the representatives “on mission” who exhibit this murderous mentality we may cite as a type the ex-curé Lebon, who, having become possessed of supreme power, ravaged Arras and Cambrai . His example, with that of Carrier, contributes to show what man can become when he escapes from the yoke of law and tradition. The cruelty of the ferocious commissary was complicated by Sadism; the scaffold was raised under his windows, so that he, his wife, and his helpers could rejoice in the carnage. At the foot of the guillotine a drinking-booth was established where the sans-culottes could

come to drink. To amuse them the executioner would group on the pavement, in ridiculous attitudes, the naked bodies of the decapitated.

“The reading of the two volumes of his trial, printed at Amiens in 1795, may be counted as a nightmare. During twenty sessions the survivors of the hecatombs of Arras and Cambrai passed through the ancient hall of the bailiwick at Amiens, where the ex-member of the Convention was tried. What these phantoms in mourning related is unheard of. Entire streets dispeopled; nonagenarians and girls of sixteen decapitated after a mockery of a trial; death buffeted, insulted, adorned, rejoiced in; executions to music; battalions of children recruited to guard the scaffold; the debauchery, the cynicism, the refinements of an insane satrap; a romance by Sade turned epic; it seems, as we watch the unpacking of these horrors, that a whole country, long terrorised, is at last disgorging its terror and revenging itself for its cowardice by overwhelming the wretch there, the scapegoat of an abhorred and vanished system.”

The only defence of the ex-clergyman was that he had obeyed orders. The facts with which he was reproached had long been known, and the Convention had in no wise blamed him for them.

I have already spoken of the vanity of the deputies “on mission,” who were suddenly endowed with a power greater than that of the most powerful despots; but this vanity is not enough to explain their ferocity.

That arose from other sources. Apostles of a severe faith, the delegates of the Convention, like the inquisitors of the Holy Office, could feel, can have felt, no pity for their victims. Freed, moreover,

from all the bonds of tradition and law, they could give rein to the most savage instincts that primitive animality has left in us.

Civilisation restrains these instincts, but they never die. The need to kill which makes the hunter is a permanent proof of this. M. Cunisset-Carnot has expressed in the following lines the grip of this hereditary tendency, which, in the pursuit of the most harmless game, re-awakens the barbarian in every hunter:—

“The pleasure of killing for killing's sake is, one may say, universal; it is the basis of the hunting instinct, for it must be admitted that at present, in civilised countries, the need to live no longer counts for anything in its propagation. In reality we are continuing an action which was imperiously imposed upon our savage ancestors by the harsh necessities of existence, during which they had either to kill or die of hunger, while to-day there is no longer any legitimate excuse for it. But so it is, and we can do nothing; probably we shall never break the chains of a slavery which has bound us for so long. We cannot prevent ourselves from feeling an intense, often passionate, pleasure in shedding the blood of animals towards whom, when the love of the chase possesses us, we lose all feeling of pity. The gentlest and prettiest creatures, the song- birds, the charm of our springtime, fall to our guns or are choked in our snares, and not a shudder of pity troubles our pleasure at seeing them terrified, bleeding, writhing in the horrible suffering we inflict on them, seeking to flee on their poor broken paws or desperately beating their wings, which can no longer support them. . . . The

excuse is the impulse of that imperious atavism which the best of us have not the strength to resist.”

At ordinary times this singular atavism, restrained by fear of the laws, can only be exercised on animals. When codes are no longer operative it immediately applies itself to man, which is why so many terrorists took an intense pleasure in killing. Carrier's remark concerning the joy he felt in contemplating the faces of his victims during their torment is very typical. In many civilised men ferocity is a restrained instinct, but it is by no means eliminated.

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.

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.