The whole claim of this party, who are now the Moderates of the Convention, is reducible to their having opposed the commission of crimes which were intended to serve their adversaries, rather than themselves. To effect the dethronement of the King, and the destruction of those obnoxious to them, they approved of popular insurrections; but expected that the people whom they had rendered proficients in cruelty, should become gentle and obedient when urged to resist their own authority; yet they now come forth as victims of their patriotism, and call the heads of the faction who are fallen—martyrs to liberty! But if they are victims, it is to their folly or wickedness in becoming members of such an assembly; and if their chiefs were martyrs, it was to the principles they inculcated.
The trial of the Brissotins was justice, compared with that of the King. If the former were condemned without proof, their partizans should remember, that the revolutionary jury pretended to be influenced by the same moral evidence they had themselves urged as the ground on which they condemned the King; and if the people beheld with applause or indifference the execution of their once-popular idols, they only put in practice the barbarous lessons which those idols had taught them;—they were forbidden to lament the fate of their Sovereign, and they rejoiced in that of Brissot and his confederates.—These men, then, only found the just retribution of their own guilt; and though it may be politic to forget that their survivors were also their accomplices, they are not objects of esteem—and the contemporary popularity, which a long seclusion has obtained for them, will vanish, if their future conduct should be directed by their original principles.*
* Louvet's pamphlet had not at this time appeared, and the subsequent events proved, that the interest taken in these Deputies was founded on a supposition they had changed their principles; for before the close of the Convention they were as much objects of hatred and contempt as their colleagues.
Some of these Deputies were the hirelings of the Duke of Orleans, and most of them are individuals of no better reputation than the rest of the Assembly. Lanjuinais has the merit of having acted with great courage in defence of himself and his party on the thirty-first of May 1792; but the following anecdote, recited by Gregoire* in the Convention a few days ago will sufficiently explain both his character and Gregoire's, who are now, however, looked up to as royalists, and as men comparatively honest.
* Gregoire is one of the constitutional Clergy, and, from the habit of comparing bad with worse, is more esteemed than many of his colleagues; yet, in his report on the progress of Vandalism, he expresses himself with sanguinary indecency—"They have torn (says he) the prints which represented the execution of Charles the first, because there were coats of arms on them. Ah, would to god we could behold, engraved in the same manner, the heads of all Kings, done from nature! We might then reconcile ourselves to seeing a ridiculous embellishment of heraldry accompany them."
—"When I first arrived at Versailles, (says Gregoire,) as member of the Constituent Assembly, (in 1789,) I met with Lanjuinais, and we took an oath in concert to dethrone the King and abolish Nobility." Now, this was before the alledged provocations of the King and Nobility—before the constitution was framed—before the flight of the royal family to Varennes—and before the war. But almost daily confessions of this sort escape, which at once justify the King, and establish the infamy of the revolutionists.
These are circumstances not to be forgotten, did not the sad science of discriminating the shades of wickedness, in which (as I have before noticed) the French have been rendered such adepts, oblige them at present to fix their hopes—not according to the degree of merit, but by that of guilt. They are reduced to distinguish between those who sanction murders, and those who perpetrated them—between the sacrificer of one thousand victims, and that of ten—between those who assassinate, and those who only reward the assassin.*
* Tallien is supposed, as agent of the municipality of paris, to have paid a million and a half of livres to the Septembrisers or assassins of the prisons! I know not whether the sum was in assignats or specie.—If in the former, it was, according to the exchange then, about two and thirty thousand pounds sterling: but if estimated in proportion to what might be purchased with it, near fifty thousand. Tallien has never denied the payment of the money— we may, therefore, conclude the charge to be true.
—Before the revolution, they would not have known how to select, where all were objects of abhorrence; but now the most ignorant are casuists in the gradations of turpitude, and prefer Tallien to Le Bon, and the Abbe Sieyes to Barrere.
The crimes of Carrier have been terminated, not punished, by death. He met his fate with a courage which, when the effect of innocence, is glorious to the sufferer, and consoling to humanity; but a career like his, so ended, was only the confirmation of a brutal and ferocious mind.*