CHAPTER VIII
ROBESPIERRE
I desire in this additional chapter to show what place Danton filled in the Revolution by describing the madness and the reaction that followed his loss; and the extent to which his influence, in spite of these, was permanent.
When Danton disappeared, one man remained the master of the terrible machine which he had created. It remains to show what were the fortunes of his work when death had come to complete the results of his abdication.
The genius of the dead man had foreseen a necessity, had met it with an institution, and that institution had proved his wisdom by its immense success. France was one within, and was beginning on her frontiers the war whose success was not to end until it had rebuilt all Europe. This unprecedented power dominated a country long used to centralisation, and was strengthened by the accidents of the time, by the even play of the government over a surface where all local obstacles had broken down, by the tacit acquiescence of every patriotic man (for it was the thing that saved the nation), by the very abuse of punitive measures. This power was destined to change from a machine to a toy.
They say the children of that time had little models of the guillotine to play with. The statement is picturesque and presumably false, but it will serve well for a simile. A man unused to action, dreaming of a perfect state which was but a reflection of his own intensely concentrated mind, acquired the control of the guillotine. Unfortunately the model was of full size.
The punishment of death had hitherto been inflicted, for the most part, with a clear and definite, though often with an immoral, object. In the hands of Robespierre it was used to defend a theory and a whim. The men of the time loved their country ardently, and believed with the firmness of a large and generous faith in those principles upon which all our civilisation is at present based. France and the Republic were, in their minds, one thing, and a thing which they spared no means to make survive the most terrible struggle into which any nation has ever dared to enter. They killed that they might be obeyed in a time which verged on anarchy, and they desired to be obeyed because, but for obedience to government, France and all her liberties would have perished. Such a motive for punishment is just, and its execution is honest.
By the side of this and beyond it were the excesses, those excesses in protest against which Danton himself had died. Execrable as were these, infamous as will ever remain their most conspicuous actors, Hébert and Carrier, they were prompted by a motive which is of the commonest and the most easily understood in human affairs. They were actions of revenge. Danton had said once and sincerely, “I can find no use for hate.” It was the key to his successful effort, by far the most creative in a time when all was energy, that no part of his strength was lost in personal attack, hardly any in personal defence. This could no more be said of his contemporaries than it can be said of the bulk of men in any nation, even in times of order and of peace. And everywhere, in Nantes, in Lyons, in the Vendée, in the accusation of Marie Antoinette, from the very beginning of the Terror, this hate had surged and broken. The Girondins were put to death on a charge full of the spirit of revenge; and as the autumn grew into winter, in the very crisis of that oppression by which the nation had been saved, the accusations became trivial, the process of justice more and more of a personal act, depending in the provinces on the temper of an emissary, in Paris upon the summary judgment of the Committee and the Tribunal.
But all this had so far been comprehensible. With the advent of Robespierre to full power we have to deal with a phase of history which will hardly be understood in happier times. Danton, who saw straight, who understood, and who, when the victories began, found leisure to pity, is a type whose extremes are the romance, whose moderation is the groundwork of history. We have to deal in him with an enthusiast who is also a statesman, in whom the mind has sufficient power to know itself even in its violence, and to return deliberately within its usual boundaries after never so fantastic an excursion. With Hébert again we know the type. Those are not rare in whom passions purely personal dominate all abstract conceptions, and whose natures desire the horrible in literature during times of peace, and satisfy their desire by action during their moments of power.
But with Robespierre an absolutely different feature is presented: the man who could laugh and the man who could hate, the right and the left wing have disappeared, and there is left standing alone a personality which had gradually become the idol of the city. He could neither laugh nor hate; the love of country itself, which illuminates so much in the Revolution, and which explains so many follies in the smaller men, even that was practically absent in the mind of Robespierre. His character would have fitted well with the absence of the human senses, and should some further document discover to historians that he lacked the sense of taste, that he was colour-blind, or that he could not distinguish the notes of music, these details would do much to complete the imperfect and troubling picture. For in the sphere that is above, but co-ordinate with, physical life, all those avenues by which our fellow-beings touch us more nearly than ideas were closed to him.