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 solemnly 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.
``Fouche,'' writes Taine, ``lorgnette in hand, watched the butchery of 210 inhabitants of Lyons from his window. Collot, Laporte, and Fouche 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-cure 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.