Efforts to restore the finances were, however, as fruitless as efforts to advance education. While millions were being squandered in the departments, taxes imposed by the Convention remained unpaid. The forced loan never brought in more than eight millions. Cambon vainly reiterated complaints that but little of the sums irregularly raised in the departments ever reached the treasury. So long as the Commune exercised power, it was impossible for the Convention to take any effectual steps for the enforcement of its decrees.
Thus it came about from a variety of causes that the existing Government gave dissatisfaction to many of those who took part in it. Even the most cruel and unprincipled of the Montagnards resented their subservient position. The institution of the Worship of Reason gave offence to many of them. The wanton waste of property and destruction of life going on in the chief commercial towns of France, in Lyons, Toulon, Bordeaux, and Nantes, excited disgust if not pity. Now that the country was no longer in any immediate danger of invasion, men, before indifferent as to what was done so long as the enemy was repulsed, awoke to the horror of the scenes that were being enacted round them. The Dantonists sincerely desired to stay the action of the guillotine. Having been pushed aside, since the reconstitution of the Committee of Public Safety in July, by men more fanatic and sanguinary than themselves, they were visited by remorse as they experienced their powerlessness to hold in check passions which they had themselves helped to unloose. ‘I cannot forget,’ wrote Desmoulins, warmly attached to his own wife and child, ‘that the men they are killing by thousands have also wives and children.’
The Hébertists attacked by Robespierre.
Besides creating discontent in the Mountain, the ascendancy of the Commune gave dissatisfaction to the Committee of Public Safety, and in particular to Robespierre. Robespierre was opposed to the principles of which Hébert had declared himself the special champion. He put himself forward, indeed, as being as well as Hébert the people’s friend, but between neither the aims nor the characters of the two men did any real similarity exist. Robespierre had no sympathy for a movement which idolised ignorance, rags, and vice, and made the Republic the prey of bands of rapacious and unscrupulous adventurers. While Hébert, by the adoption of rude manners and coarse language, sought popularity, Robespierre always maintained propriety both in language and in dress, continuing even to wear his hair powdered, as had been the custom of educated men under the monarchy. Further, the atheistic doctrines which Hébert professed were to Robespierre essentially repugnant. Robespierre was a theist of the school of Rousseau, and Rousseau had said that men could not be good citizens who did not believe in a special providence and in a future life, and that atheism was the one doctrine the public profession of which no wise legislator would tolerate.
In the Jacobins Robespierre attacked Hébert and the Commune on the ground of their intolerance. Those, he said, who persecute priests are more fanatic than the priests themselves. Atheism is aristocratic. The idea of a Supreme Being who watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is wholly popular. If God did not exist, we should have to invent him.
Thus, both by principle and ambition, Robespierre was urged on to seek the destruction of the Hébertists and of the Commune. His colleagues on the two committees, though most of them disliked him personally, and were afraid of his gaining increased ascendancy for himself, shared his desire to break the power of the Commune. As they grew more accustomed to the exercise of authority, they became impatient at having to share it with a body whose will had always to be taken into consideration, and by whose action their own was often thwarted. The Montagnards hated the tyranny of the two committees, but they hated the tyranny of the Commune yet more, and were willing to take part in overthrowing it, neglectful of the probability that by so doing they would yet more securely rivet the chains in which the committees held them. In the Convention the Hébertist generals and agents in La Vendée were incessantly accused of misconduct and incapacity, and of being responsible for whatever reverses had taken place. A law was passed intended to centralise power in the hands of the two committees, and to deprive the Commune of the instruments by means of which it secured ascendancy in the departments. The revolutionary committees of Paris were put under the supervision of the Committee of General Security. The Commune was deprived of the right of sending agents into the departments. The revolutionary army of Paris was for the time left in existence, through fear lest if an attempt were made to disband it, it might rise against the Convention, but the revolutionary armies in the departments were to be suppressed. No taxes were to be imposed without the sanction of the Convention. The law officers belonging to districts and municipalities, hitherto elected, were made dependent on the central Government, and received the name of national agents (December 4).
Struggle between Dantonists and Hébertists.
About the same time that this law was adopted, Desmoulins, encouraged by Robespierre, began the publication of a paper, the Old Cordelier, in which he first confined himself to denouncing the Hébertists, but went on to denounce the Terror itself as a great deception, and to compare the state of things in France to that which prevailed under the worst of the Roman emperors. The law of treason, he said, was extended to words; the inhabitants of towns were killed in masses. Grief, pity, looks of disapprobation, silence itself, constituted State crimes. It was a crime to be rich; a crime to give shelter to a friend. Is it possible, he asked, that the state of things which constituted despotism and the worst of governments when Tacitus wrote, constitutes to-day liberty and the best of possible worlds? You wish to exterminate your enemies by the guillotine. What folly! For every man you kill you make ten new enemies. If we do not understand by liberty the carrying out of principles, never was there an idolatry so stupid as ours, nor one that costs more. Liberty is no operatic singer promenading in a red cap. Liberty is happiness, equality, justice, the Declaration of Rights itself. If I am to recognise her presence, open the prison doors to those 200,000 citizens whom you call ‘suspected.’
Thus was the Commune attacked on three sides at once—by Montagnards, who desired the independence of the Convention; by the Committee of Public Safety, which sought the extension of its own authority; and by Dantonists, who sought to hold in check the Terror. Hébert was afraid to enter into contention with Robespierre. By the atheistic movement he had sought and attained notoriety, but its active supporters were few, and there was no probability that any considerable body of men would rally round him in its defence. Chaumette, at the Commune, made a speech on the folly of attempting to suppress religious opinions by force. Hébert went further, and made a formal denial of atheism at the Jacobins. But while seeking to curry favour with Robespierre, Hébert and his followers opened the more vehement attack on the Dantonists. Here they were surer of their ground, for all who had been actively engaged in the work of destruction dreaded the first step of reaction, lest vengeance should overtake themselves. The Cordeliers erased the names of Danton and Desmoulins from their list of members. Collot, the director of the atrocities committed at Lyons, who had returned to Paris in December, expressed amazement that the first who spoke of clemency had not been sent to the scaffold. Amongst the twelve men who formed the Committee of Public Safety no good understanding existed. Six concerned themselves with special branches of administration, but took no part in directing the general action of the Government. The remaining six were not all of one mind. Couthon and St. Just were devoted adherents of Robespierre. Barère, originally a deputy of the centre, and a temporiser between the Mountain and the Gironde, was indifferent whether Robespierre or Hébert succumbed, so long as he found himself on the winning side. Billaud and Collot, who acted together, were the two most sanguinary men on the committee. They were connected with the Hébertists. They had no quarrel with the establishment of the Worship of Reason, and dreaded, by the destruction of Hébert, to give Robespierre an opportunity of domineering over themselves. As members of the committee, however, they disliked the rivalry of the Commune, and they were besides afraid both of Robespierre’s enmity and of the triumph of the Dantonists. Accordingly, they were prepared to sacrifice Hébert, so long as they could secure themselves against reaction by putting Danton to death as well. On his side, Robespierre was prepared to sacrifice Danton. He could not join the Dantonist reaction against the Terror without imperilling his influence at the Jacobins, and forcing Collot and Billaud to make common cause with Hébert. Moreover, were the Hébertists suppressed by the triumph of the Dantonists, Robespierre would have to face the contingency of the Mountain shaking off the control of the two committees.
Robespierre and the Jacobins.