The apostles of the Jacobin belief behaved as their fathers had done, and employed the same methods. If similar events occurred again we should see identical actions repeated. If a new belief—Socialism, for example—were to triumph to-morrow, it would be led to employ methods of propaganda like those of the Inquisition and the Terror.
But were we to regard the Jacobin Terror solely as the result of a religious movement, we should not completely apprehend it. Around a triumphant religious belief, as we saw in the case of the Reformation, gather a host of individual interests which are dependent on that belief. The Terror was directed by a few fanatical apostles, but beside this small number of ardent proselytes, whose narrow minds dreamed of regenerating the world, were great numbers of men who lived only to enrich themselves. They rallied readily around the first victorious leader who promised to enable them to enjoy the results of their pillage.
``The Terrorists of the Revolution,'' writes Albert Sorel, ``resorted to the Terror because they wished to remain in power, and were incapable of doing so by other means. They employed it for their own salvation, and after the event they stated that their motive was the salvation of the State. Before it became a system it was a means of government, and the system was only invented to justify the means.''
We may thus fully agree with the following verdict on the Terror, written by Emile Ollivier in his work on the Revolution: ``The Terror was above all a Jacquerie, a regularised pillage, the vastest enterprise of theft that any association of criminals has ever organised.''
2. The Revolutionary Tribunals.
The Revolutionary Tribunals constituted the principal means of action of the Terror. Besides that of Paris, created at the instigation of Danton, and which a year afterwards sent its founder to the guillotine, France was covered with such tribunals.
``One hundred and seventy-eight tribunals,'' says Taine, ``of which 40 were perambulant, pronounced death sentences in all parts of the country, which were carried out instantly on the spot. Between the 16th of April, 1793, and the 9th of Thermidor in the year II. that of Paris guillotined 2,625 persons, and the provincial judges worked as hard as those of Paris. In the little town of Orange alone 331 persons were guillotined. In the city of Arras 299 men and 93 women were guillotined. . . . In the city of Lyons alone the revolutionary commissioner admitted to 1,684 executions. . . . The total number of these murders has been put at 17,000, among whom were 1,200 women, of whom a number were octogenarians.''
Although the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris claimed only 2,625 victims, it must not be forgotten that all the suspects had already been summarily massacred during the ``days'' of September.
The Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris, a mere instrument of the Committee of Public Safety, limited itself in reality, as Fouquier-Tinville justly remarked during his trial, to executing its orders. It surrounded itself at first with a few legal forms which did not long survive. Interrogatory, defence, witnesses— all were finally suppressed. Moral proof—that is, mere suspicion—sufficed to procure condemnation. The president usually contented himself with putting a vague question to the accused. To work more rapidly still, Fouquier-Tinville proposed to have the guillotine installed on the same premises as the Tribunal.
This Tribunal sent indiscriminately to the scaffold all the accused persons arrested by reason of party hatred, and very soon, in the hands of Robespierre, it constituted an instrument of the bloodiest tyranny. When Danton, one of its founders, became its victim, he justly asked pardon of God and men, before mounting the scaffold for having assisted to create such a Tribunal.