THE EIGHTEENTH FRUCTIDOR
While Sothin, the minister of police, was drawing up his placards, and proposing to have Carnot and forty-two deputies shot—while the directors were annulling the appointment of Barthélemy, the fifth director, and promising his place to Augereau if they had reason to be satisfied with him when the evening of the next day arrived—two men were quietly playing backgammon in a corner of the Luxembourg.
One of these two men, the younger by two years only, had begun as an officer of engineers, and had published mathematical essays which had won him admittance into several societies of learning. He had also composed a eulogy on Vauban which had been crowned by the Academy of Dijon.
At the dawn of the Revolution he was a captain of engineers, and had been appointed Chevalier of Saint-Louis. In 1791 the department of the Pas-de-Calais had elected him deputy to the Legislative Assembly. His first speech there had been directed against the emigré princes at Coblentz, against the Marquis de Mirabeau, against Cardinal de Rohan, and against Monsieur de Calonne, who was intriguing with foreign kings to induce them to declare war upon France. He proposed that non-commissioned officers and sergeants should take the place of the officers belonging to the nobility who had emigrated. In 1792, he asked for the demolition of all the bastilles in the interior of France, and presented measures to abolish the passive obedience which had formerly been exacted from officers and soldiers.
In the days when the Revolution had been threatened by foreign powers, he had asked to have three hundred thousand pikes manufactured to arm the people of Paris. Elected a deputy to the National Assembly, he had unhesitatingly voted the death of the king. He had furthered the acquirement of the principality of Monaco and a part of Belgium by France.
Sent to the Army of the North in 1793, he had degraded General Gratien from his rank upon the field of battle, because he fell back before the enemy, and placing himself at the head of the French column, he won back the ground that had been lost.
In the month of August of the same year he had been chosen a member of the Committee of Public Safety, and, in that position, displayed an extraordinary talent which has become proverbial, by organizing fourteen armies and formulating plans of campaign, not only for each army by itself, but for operations including them all. It was at that time that the French armies won that astonishing series of victories, from the recovery of Toulon to the surrender of the four strongholds in the North.
This man was Lazare-Nicholas-Marguerite Carnot, the fourth director, who, not having been able to agree with Barras, Rewbell, and La Reveillière-Lepaux, had just been condemned to death by them, being thought too dangerous to be allowed to live. His partner, who was shaking the dice with a nonchalance equal to Carnot's energy, was the Marquis François Barthélemy, the last of the directors to be appointed, who had no other merit than that of being the nephew of the Abbé Barthélemy, the author of the "Voyage du jeune Anarcharsis."
As minister from France to Switzerland during the Revolution, he had concluded at Basel two years before the time of which we are now speaking, the treaties of peace with Prussia and Spain, which had put an end to the first coalition. He had been chosen because of the well-known moderation of his opinions; and it was this very moderation which had justly led to his dismissal by his colleagues, and was later to lead to his incarceration.