The Jacobin club was the field where the battle between Robespierre and Hébert was first fought out. In this society, which was Robespierre’s stronghold, Hébert was powerless to contend against him. Many of the frequenters of the club were indeed Hébertists, but their influence was small compared with that of Robespierre and his supporters. All the small tradesmen and artisans who, uninfluenced by sordid motives, still took interest in political affairs, idolised Robespierre. While Hébert had the adherence of the unprincipled and vicious only, who were sure to abandon him in time of peril, Robespierre had the affection of partisans ready to stand by him, and in case of need to die for him. His undoubted integrity, his constant talk of virtue and morality, the reserve of his manner, the very dryness of his language, made a deep impression upon sincere but narrow and fervent minds. The rough men and women who frequented the galleries of the Jacobins listened to him with rapt attention, and applauded his words with such hearty energy that persons who ventured amongst them without imitating their conduct became objects of remark. The society which Robespierre thus dominated was a real political power, and had for long been the instrument by aid of which he had been able to assume precedence of his colleagues in the Committee of Public Safety. Every resolution the club adopted the Convention had ultimately to adopt; and every individual whom the club proscribed, were he a minister, a general, a deputy, or any other, went in the course of a few days to prison and the guillotine. No man was regarded as a good patriot who was not a Jacobin, and hundreds of persons who never entered the place had, for the sake of security, inscribed their names as members.
Fall of Hébertists and Dantonists.
Robespierre, as his habit was before he was sure of his path, adopted an undecided attitude between the Hébertists and the Dantonists, blaming the extreme, whether of excess or of moderation. The Hébertists sought to strengthen their position in the club by attacking the Dantonists; and it was only owing to Robespierre’s protection that Desmoulins and others who had demanded the adoption of a more clement policy, were able to maintain their footing in the society. Finally, Robespierre secured his end by abandoning the Dantonists as victims to the fanaticism and cruelty of his followers, whilst he openly sought the proscription of the Hébertists. One after another, persons who had either professed atheism or had displayed feelings of humanity, were deprived of membership. The club became the tool of the Committee of Public Safety, and none but the satellites of Robespierre and Collot breathed freely in it. The Dantonists had no support to which to look but the feeble and disunited Mountain. No one trusted his neighbour, and each dreaded to oppose the will of the two committees, lest he should afterwards be abandoned to their vengeance. Although the Hébertists appeared more formidable, the danger of their being able to overpower their adversaries was small. They could no longer rely for support on the forces which had been at their disposal in July and August. After the passing of the maximum laws they had played their last card, and had no means left by which to move the populace to take their side. On the contrary, it had become a constant effort on the part of the Commune to prevent the gathering together of hungry crowds in the streets, which might lead to a perfectly genuine explosion of popular fury directed against itself. Every vestige of free political life had been stamped out. The general assemblies of the sections only met twice a week, and those attending them were paid. Clubs to which many members belonged were viewed with suspicion and discountenanced. The great maximum law of September, fixing prices at a third above what they were in 1790, had ruined so many persons that it was abandoned as untenable. A new law took as a basis the real cost of each article in the place of production, allowed a certain percentage for carriage, ten per cent. for the wholesale, and five per cent. for the retail dealer. The tariff for Paris, which was published in March, excited great discontent. Of the needier supporters of the Commune many had now acquired booty or office, and hesitated to risk their lives by taking up the cause of Hébert against Robespierre. The Committee of Public Safety bid for the support of the idle and hungry by two laws, the one (February 26) ordering the sequestration of property belonging to the enemies of the revolution, the second (March 3) promising that means should be taken to make provision for destitute patriots out of the sequestered property. An attempt, headed by the Cordeliers, to get up an insurrection against the Convention and the two committees failed. Hébert and eighteen others were arrested and condemned to death by the revolutionary court on the usual absurd charge of seeking to destroy the Convention and to restore monarchy (March 24). A few days after their execution came the turn of the Dantonists. Danton, Desmoulins, and two other deputies were arrested in the night. The Convention abandoned them on the demand of St. Just, without a voice speaking in their defence (March 31). Danton, forewarned, had made no effort to save himself. Can a man, he replied when urged to fly, take his country with him on the soles of his shoes? By the court which he had himself taken part in instituting, he and his friends were condemned as monarchists and traitors to the Republic. No documents were produced, and the accused were not suffered to make their defence. ‘On such a day,’ said Danton in prison, ‘I caused to be erected the revolutionary court. I ask pardon of God and man.’ Shortly afterwards a new batch of victims was brought to the scaffold, some Hébertists, others Dantonists. Amongst them was the widow of Hébert and the young widow of Desmoulins, with whom, as well as with her husband, Robespierre had lived on terms of close intimacy.
CHAPTER IX.
THE FALL OF ROBESPIERRE.
Dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety.
The members of the Committee of Public Safety now concentrated all the powers of government in their own hands. The Mountain was crushed with Danton, the Commune with Hébert. The deputies in mission, who before had joined the Hébertist party, now sought to guard their heads by pursuing whatever line of action was indicated to them by the committee. The Commune was reconstituted and placed under the direction of two men devoted to Robespierre—its mayor, Fleuriot-Lescot, and its national agent, Payan. The partisans of Hébert on civil and revolutionary committees were replaced. The system of popular election was abandoned even in form, and all reappointments were made either by the committee itself, or by the Convention at its dictation. The ministries were abolished, and the ministerial departments divided between twelve commissions, on which new men were placed.
Aims of Robespierre.
Reports of the execution of the Hébertists penetrated the prison walls, and aroused hope that the Terror itself was to come to an end. Such hopes rapidly proved delusive. The dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety, founded by terror, rested on terror alone. Collot and Billaud had no other thought than to perpetuate their rule by continuing the system already in force. Robespierre was equally cruel, not, as in their case, from mere disregard of the amount of blood shed, but because he aimed at more, and regarded the guillotine as the most facile instrument for the attainment of his ends. He could not be satisfied with that which satisfied Billaud and Collot. Already the most prominent man on the committee, he sought the first place in the Republic, and to figure before Europe as the maintainer of virtue and the regenerator of his country. He had learned of Rousseau to regard as utterly hateful the state of society in the midst of which he had grown up with its division of classes and glaring contrasts between knowledge and ignorance, indolence and toil, luxury and squalor. Had the power been his, he would have destroyed every vestige of it by fusing all classes into one, abolishing vice and ignorance, with the extremes of wealth and poverty, and giving to all citizens similar interests, habits and pleasures. This ideal, which was Rousseau’s, was always present in Robespierre’s mind, veiling from him his own ambition; but it was vague, and he had no definite conception of the manner in which its realisation should be attempted. He was not a thinker or an organiser. Rousseau had suggested education and legislation as possible means of regeneration. To these Robespierre added nothing but the guillotine, the principle of extermination of opponents. All who stood in his light he proscribed one after another, as they appeared before him—the noble, the capitalist, the merchant, the free-trader, the atheist, the fanatic, the merciful, the moderate, the corrupt, the extortionate, and even the neutral man, until at last the people whose praises were constantly on his lips dwindled down in his mind to be no more than the Robespierrists, a few hundred ignorant and credulous but fervent supporters and admirers.
St. Just.
Behind Robespierre was St. Just, a young man a little over twenty, fanatic, self-confident and intolerant. In thought he was more audacious than Robespierre, and his conceptions were more definite. He was probably the most thorough-going disciple of Rousseau in France. Like his master, he based his conceptions of what the government of a great state ought to be on the institutions of the petty republics of antiquity, and of all those republics the one which he selected for imitation was, strangely enough, that of aristocratic Sparta. But it was the despotism of Sparta, not its aristocracy, which he admired. By means of Spartan institutions he thought to remould the habits and customs of his countrymen. All boys were to be brought up together in common schools. Every man was to marry, and every man to work. Every man was to have friends, and to make every year a public declaration of their names in the temple of the Supreme Being. If he committed a crime, his friends were to be banished from the Republic. In short, by aid of laws and state institutions of this character, St. Just believed it possible to give to the French people simple, frugal, and industrious habits. Circumstances, he said, were of no importance, except to men who fear death. Meanwhile, until the necessary institutions should be established and the habits and beliefs of his countrymen transformed, St. Just, like Robespierre, fell back on the guillotine in order to get rid of those who stood in the way of the accomplishment of his ideal. Until men were virtuous in his sense of the word, the Republic could rest upon terror alone. What, asked this young, fanatical, and unscrupulous theorist, would those have who reject alike as principles of government virtue and terror?