"All aristocrats are corrupt, and every corrupt man is an aristocrat;" for, "republican government and public morality are one and the same thing."[31134]
Not only do evil-doers of both species tend through instinct and interest to league together, but their league is already perfected. One has only to open one's eyes to detect "in all its extent" the plot they have hatched, "the frightful system of destruction of public morality."[31135] Guadet, Vergniaud, Gensonné, Danton, Hébert, "all of them artificial characters," had no other end in view: "they felt[31136] that, to destroy liberty, it was necessary to favor by every means whatever tended to justify egoism, wither the heart and efface that idea of moral beauty, which affords the only rule for public reason in its judgment of the defenders and enemies of humanity."—Their heirs remain; but let those be careful. Immorality is a political offense; one conspires against the State merely by making a parade of materialism or by preaching indulgence, by acting scandalously, or by following evil courses, by stock-jobbing, by dining too sumptuously; by being vicious, scheming, given to exaggeration, or "on the fence;" by exciting or perverting the people, by deceiving the people, by finding fault with the people, by distrusting the people,[31137] short, when one does not march straight along on the prescribed path marked out by Robespierre according to principles: whoever stumbles or turns aside is a scoundrel, a traitor. Now, not counting the Royalists, Feuillantists, Girondists, Hébertists, Dantonists, and others already decapitated or imprisoned according to their merit, how many traitors still remain in the Convention, on the Committees, amongst the representatives on mission, in the administrative bodies not properly weeded out, amongst petty tyrannical underlings and the entire ruling, influential class at Paris and in the provinces? Outside of "about twenty political Trappists in the Convention," outside of a small devoted group of pure Jacobins in Paris, outside of a faithful few scattered among the popular clubs of the departments, how many Fouchés, Vadiers, Talliens, Bourdons, Collots, remain amongst the so-called revolutionaries? How many dissidents are there, disguised as orthodox, charlatans disguised as patriots, and pashas disguised as sans-culottes?[31138] Add all this vermin to that which Marat seeks to crush out; it is no longer by hundreds of thousands, but by millions, exclaim Baudot, Jeanbon-Saint-André and Guffroy, that the guilty must be counted and cut off their heads!—And all these heads, Robespierre, according to his maxims, must strike off. He is well aware of this; hostile as his intellect may be to precise ideas, he, when alone in his closet, face to face with himself, sees clearly, as clearly as Marat. Marat's chimera, on first spreading out its wings, bore its frenzied rider swiftly onward to the charnel house; that of Robespierre, fluttering and hobbling along, reaches the goal in its turn; in its turn, it demands something to feed on, and the rhetorician, the professor of principles, begins to assess the voracity of the monstrous brute on which he is mounted. Slower than the other, this one is still more ravenous, for, with similar claws and teeth, it has a vaster appetite. At the end of three years Robespierre has overtaken Marat, at that distant end of the line, at the station where Marat had established himself from the very beginning, and the theoretician now adopts the policy, the aim, the means, the work, and almost the vocabulary of a maniac:[31139]
armed dictatorship of the urban mob,
systematic perturbation of the bribed rabble,
war against the bourgeoisie,
extermination of the rich,
placing opposition writers, administrators and deputies outside the law.
Both monsters get the same food; only, to the ration of his monster, Robespierre adds "vicious men" as its special and favorite prey. Henceforth, he may in vain abstain from action, take refuge in his rhetoric, stop his chaste ears, and raise his hypocritical eyes to heaven, he cannot avoid seeing or hearing under his immaculate feet the streaming gore, and the bones crashing in the open jaws of the insatiable monster which he has fashioned and on which he rides.[31140] These ever open and hungry jaws must be daily fed with an ampler supply of human flesh; not only is he bound to let it eat, but to furnish the food, often with his own hands, except that he must afterwards wash them, declaring, and even believing, that no spot of blood has ever soiled them. He is generally content to caress and flatter the brute, to excuse it, to let it go on. Nevertheless, more than once, tempted by the opportunity, he has launched it against his designated victim.[31141] He is now himself starting off in quest of living prey; he casts the net of his rhetoric[31142] around it; he fetches it bound to the open jaws; he thrusts aside with an uncompromising air the arms of friends, wives and mothers, the outstretched hands of suppliants begging for lives;[31143] he suddenly throttles the struggling victims[31144] and, for fear that they might escape, he strangles them in time. Near the end, this is no longer enough; the brute must have grander quarries, and, accordingly, a pack of hounds, beaters-up, and, willingly or not, it is Robespierre who equips, directs and urges them on, at Orange, at Paris,[31145] ordering them to empty the prison's, and be expeditious in doing their work.—In this profession of slaughtering, destructive instincts, long repressed by civilization, become aroused. His feline physiognomy, at first "that of a domestic cat, restless but mild, changes into the savage appearance of the wildcat, and close to the ferocious exterior of the tiger. In the Constituent Assembly he speaks with a whine, in the Convention he froths at the mouth."[31146] The monotonous drone of a stiff sub-professor changes into the personal accent of furious passion; he hisses and grinds his teeth;[31147] Sometimes, on a change of scene, he affects to shed tears.[31148] But his wildest outbursts are less alarming than his affected sensibility. The festering grudges, corrosive envies and bitter scheming which have accumulated in his breast are astonishing. The gall bladder is full, and the extravasated gall overflows on the dead. He never tires of re-executing his guillotined adversaries, the Girondists, Chaumette, Hébert and especially Danton,[31149] probably because Danton was the active agent in the Revolution of which he was simply the incapable pedagogue; he vents his posthumous hatred on this still warm corpse in artful insinuations and obvious misrepresentations. Thus, inwardly corroded by the venom it distills, his physical machine gets out of order, like that of Marat, but with other symptoms. When speaking in the tribune "his hands crisp with a sort of nervous contraction;" sudden tremors agitate "his shoulders and neck, shaking him convulsively to and fro."[31150] "His bilious complexion becomes livid," his eyelids quiver under his spectacles, and how he looks! "Ah," said a Montagnard, "you would have voted as we did on the 9th of Thermidor, had you seen his green eyeballs!" "Physically as well as morally," he becomes a second Marat, suffering all the more because his delirium is not steady, and because his policy, being a moral one, forces him to exterminate on a grander scale.
But he is a discreet Marat, of a timid temperament, anxious,[31151] keeping his thoughts to himself, made for a school-master or a pleader, but not for taking the lead or for governing, always acting hesitatingly, and ambitious to be rather the pope, than the dictator of the Revolution.[31152] Above all, he wants to remain a political Grandison[31153]; until the very end, he keeps his mask, not only in public but also to himself and in his inmost conscience. The mask, indeed, has adhered to his skin; he can no longer distinguish one from the other; never did an impostor more carefully conceal intentions and acts under sophisms, and persuade himself that the mask was his face, and that in telling a lie, he told the truth.
Taking his word for it, he had nothing to do with the September events.[31154] "Previous to these events, he had ceased to attend the General Council of the Commune... He no longer went there." He was not charged with any duty, he had no influence there; he had not provoked the arrest and murder of the Girondists.[31155] All he did was to "speak frankly concerning certain members of the Committee of Twenty-one;" as "a magistrate" and "one of a municipal assembly." Should he not" explain himself freely on the authors of a dangerous plot?" Besides, the Commune "far from provoking the 2nd of September did all in its power to prevent it." After all, only one innocent person perished, "which is undoubtedly one too many. Citizens, mourn over this cruel mistake; we too have long mourned over it! But, as all things human come to an end, let your tears cease to flow." When the sovereign people resumes its delegated power and exercises its inalienable rights, we have only to bow our heads.—Moreover, it is just, wise and good "in all that it undertakes, all is virtue and truth; nothing can be excess, error or crime."[31156] It must intervene when its true representatives are hampered by the law "let it assemble in its sections and compel the arrest of faithless deputies."[31157] What is more legal than such a motion, which is the only part Robespierre took on the 31st of May. He is too scrupulous to commit or prescribe an illegal act. That will do for the Dantons, the Marats, men of relaxed morals or excited brains, who if need be, tramp in the gutters and roll up their shirt-sleeves; as to himself, he can do nothing that would ostensibly derange or soil the dress proper to an honest man and irreproachable citizen. In the Committee of Public Safety, he merely executes the decrees of the Convention, and the Convention is always free. He a dictator! He is merely one of seven hundred deputies, and his authority, if he has any, is simply the legitimate ascendancy of reason and virtue.[31158] He a murderer! If he has denounced conspirators, it is the Convention which summons these before the revolutionary Tribunal,[31159] and the revolutionary Tribunal pronounces judgment on them. He a terrorist! He merely seeks to simplify the established proceedings, so as to secure a speedier release of the innocent, the punishment of the guilty, and the final purgation that is to render liberty and morals the order of the day.[31160]—Before uttering all this he almost believes it, and, when he has uttered it he believes it fully.[31161] When nature and history combine, to produce a character, they succeed better than man's imagination. Neither Molière in his "Tartuffe," nor Shakespeare in his "Richard III.," dared bring on the stage a hypocrite believing himself sincere, and a Cain that regarded himself as an Abel.[31162] There he stands on a colossal stage, in the presence of a hundred thousand spectators, on the 8th of June, 1794, the most glorious day of his life, at that fête in honor of the Supreme Being, which is the glorious triumph of his doctrine and the official consecration of his papacy. Two characters are found in Robespierre, as in the Revolution which he represents: one, apparent, paraded, external, and the other hidden, dissembled, inward, the latter being overlaid by the former.—The first one all for show, fashioned out of purely cerebral cogitations, is as artificial as the solemn farce going on around him. According to David's programme, the cavalcade of supernumeraries who file in front of an allegorical mountain, gesticulate and shout at the command, and under the eyes, of Henriot and his gendarmes,[31163] manifesting at the appointed time the emotions which are prescribed for them. At five o'clock in the morning
"friends, husbands, wives, relations and children will embrace.... The old man, his eyes streaming with tears of joy, feels himself rejuvenated."
At two o'clock, on the turf-laid terraces of the sacred mountain,
"all will show a state of commotion and excitement: mothers here press to their bosoms the infants they suckle, and there offer them up in homage to the author of Nature, while youths, aglow with the ardor of battle, simultaneously draw their swords and hand them to their venerable fathers. Sharing in the enthusiasm of their sons, the deported old men embrace them and bestow on them the paternal benediction..... All the men distributed around the 'Field of Reunion' sing in chorus the (first) refrain.... All the Women distributed around the 'Field of Reunion' sing in unison the (second) refrain.... All Frenchmen partake of each other's sentiments in one grand fraternal embrace."