Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3), Essay 1: Robespierre

by John Morley

Robespierre was unutterably outraged by the proceedings of the atheists. They perplexed him as a politician intent upon order, and they afflicted him sorely as an ardent disciple of the Savoyard Vicar. Hébert, however, was so strong that it needed some courage to attack him, nor did Robespierre dare to withstand him to the face. But he did not flinch from making an energetic assault upon atheism and the excesses of its partisans. His admirers usually count his speech of the Twenty-first of November one of the most admirable of his oratorical successes. The Sphinx still sits inexorable at our gates, and his words have lost none of their interest. 'Every philosopher and every individual,' he said, 'may adopt whatever opinion he pleases about atheism. Any one who wishes to make such an opinion into a crime is an insensate; but the public man or the legislator who should adopt such a system, would be a hundred times more insensate still. The National Convention abhors it. The Convention is not the author of a scheme of metaphysics. It was not to no purpose that it published the Declaration of the Rights of Man in presence of the Supreme Being. I shall be told perhaps that I have a narrow intelligence, that I am a man of prejudice, and a fanatic. I have already said that I spoke neither as an individual nor as a philosopher with a system, but as a representative of the people. Atheism is aristocratic. The idea of a great being who watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is essentially the idea of the people. This is the sentiment of Europe and the Universe; it is the sentiment of the French nation. That people is attached neither to priests, nor to superstition, nor to ceremonies; it is attached only to worship in itself, or in other words to the idea of an incomprehensible Power, the terror of wrongdoers, the stay and comfort of virtue, to which it delights to render words of homage that are all so many anathemas against injustice and triumphant crime.'

This is Robespierre's favourite attitude, the priest posing as statesman. Like others, he declares the Supreme Power incomprehensible, and then describes him in terms of familiar comprehension. He first declares atheism an open choice, and then he brands it with the most odious epithet in the accepted vocabulary of the hour. Danton followed practically the same line, though saying much less about it. 'If Greece,' he said in the Convention, 'had its Olympian games, France too shall solemnise her sans-culottid days. The people will have high festivals; they will offer incense to the Supreme Being, to the master of nature; for we never intended to annihilate the reign of superstition in order to set up the reign of atheism.... If we have not honoured the priest of error and fanaticism, neither do we wish to honour the priest of incredulity: we wish to serve the people. I demand that there shall be an end of these anti-religious masquerades in the Convention.'

There was an end of the masquerading, but the Hébertists still kept their ground. Danton, Robespierre, and the Committee were all equally impotent against them for some months longer. The revolutionary force had been too strong to be resisted by any government since the Paris insurgents had carried both King and Assembly in triumph from Versailles in the October of 1789. It was now too strong for those who had begun to strive with all their might to build a new government out of the agencies that had shattered the old to pieces. For some months the battle which had been opened by Robespierre's remonstrance against atheistic intolerance, degenerated into a series of masked skirmishes. The battle-ground of rival principles was overshadowed by the baleful wings of the genius of demonic Hate. Vexilla regis prodeunt inferni; the banners of the King of the Pit came forth. The scene at the Cordeliers for a time became as frantic as a Council of the Early Church settling the true composition of the Holy Trinity. Or it recalls the fierce and bloody contentions between Demos and Oligarchy in an old Greek town. We think of the day in the harbour of Corcyra when the Athenian admiral who had come to deliver the people, sailed out to meet the Spartan enemy, and on turning round to see if his Corcyrean allies were following, saw them following indeed, but the crew of every ship striving in enraged conflict with one another. Collot D'Herbois had come back in hot haste from Lyons, where, along with Fouché, he had done his best to carry out the decree of the Convention, that not one stone of the city should be left on the top of another, and that even its very name should cease from the lips of men. Carrier was recalled from Nantes, where his feats of ingenious massacre had rivalled the exploits of the cruellest and maddest of the Roman Emperors. The presence of these men of blood gave new courage and resolution to the Hébertists. Though the alliance was informal, yet as against Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and the rest of the Indulgents, as well as against Robespierre, they made common cause.

Camille Desmoulins attacked Hébert in successive numbers of a journal that is perhaps the one truly literary monument of this stage of the revolution. Hébert retaliated by impugning the patriotism of Desmoulins in the Club, and the unfortunate wit, notwithstanding the efforts of Robespierre on his behalf, was for a while turned out of the sacred precincts. The power of the extreme faction was shown in relation to other prominent members of the party whom they loved to stigmatise by the deadly names of Indulgent and Moderantist. Even Danton himself was attacked (December 1793), and the integrity of his patriotism brought into question. Robespierre made an energetic defence of his great rival in the hierarchy of revolution, and the defence saved Danton from the mortal ignominy of expulsion from the communion of the orthodox. On the other hand, Anacharsis Clootz, that guileless ally of the party of delirium, was less fortunate. Robespierre assailed the cosmopolitan for being a German baron, for having four thousand pounds a year, and for striking his sans-culottism some notes higher than the regular pitch. Even M. Louis Blanc calls this an iniquity, and sets it down as the worst page in Robespierre's life. Others have described Robespierre as struck at this time by the dire malady of kings—hatred of the Idea. It seems, however, a hard saying that devotion to the Idea is to extinguish common sense. Clootz, notwithstanding his simple and disinterested character, and his possession of some rays of the modern illumination, was one of the least sane of all the men who in the exultation of their silly gladness were suddenly caught up by that great wheel of fire. All we can say is that Robespierre's bitter demeanour towards Clootz was ungenerous; but then this is only natural in him. Robespierre often clothed cool policy in the semblance of clemency, but I cannot hear in any phrase he ever used, or see in any measure he ever proposed, the mark of true generosity; of kingliness of spirit, not a trace. He had no element of ready and cordial propitiation, an element that can never be wanting in the greatest leaders in time of storm. If he resisted the atrocious proposals to put Madame Elizabeth to death, he was thinking not of mercy or justice, but of the mischievous effect that her execution would have upon the public opinion of Europe, and he was so unmanly as to speak of her as la méprisable sœur de Louis XVI. Such a phrase is the disclosure of an abject stratum in his soul.

Yet this did not prevent him from seeing and denouncing the bloody extravagances of the Proconsuls, the representatives of Parisian authority in the provinces; nor from standing firm against the execution of the Seventy-Three, who had been bold enough to question the purgation of the National Convention on the Thirty-first of May. But the return of Collot d'Herbois made the situation more intricate. Collot was by his position the ally of Billaud, and to attack him, therefore, was to attack the most powerful member of the Committee of Public Safety. Billaud was too formidable. He was always the impersonation of the ruder genius of the Revolution, and the incarnation of the philosophy of the Terror, not as a delirium, but as a piece of deliberate policy. His pale, sober, and concentrated physiognomy seemed a perpetual menace. He had no gifts of speech, but his silence made people shudder, like the silence of the thunder when the tempest rages at its height. It was said by contemporaries that if Vadier was a hyæna, Barère a jackal, and Robespierre a cat, Billaud was a tiger.

The cat perceived that he was in danger of not having the tiger, jackal, and hyæna, on his side. Robespierre, in whom spasmodical courage and timidity ruled by rapid turns, began to suspect that he had been premature; and a convenient illness, which some suppose to have been feigned, excused his withdrawal for some weeks from a scene where he felt that he could no longer see clear. We cannot doubt that both he and Danton were perfectly assured that the anarchic party must unavoidably roll headlong into the abyss. But the hour of doom was uncertain. To make a mistake in the right moment, to hurry the crisis, was instant death. Robespierre was a more adroit calculator than Danton. We must not confound his thin and querulous reserve with that stout and deep-browed patience, which may imply as superb a fortitude, and may demand as much iron control in a statesman, as the most heroic exploits of political energy. But his habit of waiting on force, instead of, like the other, taking the initiative with force, had trained his sight. The mixture of astuteness with his scruple, of egoistic policy with his stiffness for doctrine, gave him an advantage over Danton, that made his life worth exactly three months' more purchase than Danton's. It has been said that Spinozism or Transcendentalism in poetic production becomes Machiavellism in reflection: for the same reasons we may always expect sentimentalism in theory to become under the pressure of action a very self-protecting guile. Robespierre's mind was not rich nor flexible enough for true statesmanship, and it is a grave mistake to suppose that the various cunning tacks in which his career abounds, were any sign of genuine versatility or resource or political growth and expansion. They were, in fact, the resort of a man whose nerves were weaker than his volition. Robespierre was a kind of spinster. Force of head did not match his spiritual ambition. He was not, we repeat, a coward in any common sense; in that case he would have remained quiet among the croaking frogs of the Marsh, and by and by have come to hold a portfolio under the first Consul. He did not fear death, and he envied with consuming envy those to whom nature had given the qualities of initiative. But his nerves always played him false. The consciousness of having to resolve to take a decided step alone, was the precursor of a fit of trembling. His heart did not fail, but he could not control the parched voice, nor the twitching features, not the ghastly palsy of inner misgiving. In this respect Robespierre recalls a more illustrious man; we think of Cicero tremblingly calling upon the Senate to decide for him whether he should order the execution of the Catilinarian conspirators. It is to be said, however, in his favour that he had the art, which Cicero lacked, to hide his pusillanimity. Robespierre knew himself, and did his best to keep his own secret.

His absence during the final crisis of the anarchic party allowed events to ripen, without committing him to that initiative in dangerous action which he had dreaded on the Tenth of August, as he dreaded it on every other decisive day of this burning time. The party of the Commune became more and more daring in their invectives against the Convention and the Committees. At length they proclaimed open insurrection. But Paris was cold, and opinion was divided. In the night of the Thirteenth of March, Hébert, Chaumette, Clootz, were arrested. The next day Robespierre recovered sufficiently to appear at the Jacobin Club. He joined his colleagues of the Committee of Public Safety in striking the blow. On the Twenty-fourth of March the Ultra-Revolutionist leaders were beheaded.

The first bloody breach in the Jacobin ranks was speedily followed by the second. The Right wing of the opposition to the Committee soon followed the Left down the ways to dusty death, and the execution of the Anarchists only preceded by a week the arrest of the Moderates. When the seizure of Danton had once before been discussed in the Committee, Robespierre resisted the proposal violently. We have already seen how he defended Danton at the Jacobin Club, when the Club underwent the process of purification in the winter. What produced this sudden tack? How came Robespierre to assent in March to a violence which he had angrily discountenanced in February? There had been no change in the policy or attitude of Danton himself. The military operations against the domestic and foreign enemies were no sooner fairly in the way of success, than Danton began to meditate in serious earnest the consolidation of a republican system of law and justice. He would fain have stayed the Terror. 'Let us leave something,' he said, 'to the guillotine of opinion.' He aided, no doubt, in the formation of the Revolutionary Tribunal, but this was exactly in harmony with his usual policy of controlling popular violence without alienating the strength of popular sympathy. The process of the tribunal was rough and summary, but it was fairer—until Robespierre's Law of Prairial—than people usually suppose, and it was the very temple of the goddess of Justice herself compared with the September massacres. 'Let us prove ourselves terrible,' Danton said, 'to relieve the people from the necessity of being so.' His activity had been incessant in urging and superintending the great levies against the foreigner; he had gone repeatedly on distant and harassing expeditions, as the representative of the Convention at the camps on the frontier. In the midst of all this he found time to press forward measures for the instruction of the young, and for the due appointment of judges, and his head was full of ideas for the construction of a permanent executive council. It was this which made him eager for a cessation of the method of Terror, and it was this which made the Committee of Public Safety his implacable enemy.

Why, then, did Robespierre, who also passed as a man of order and humanity, not continue to support Danton after the suppression of the Hébertists, as he had supported him before? The common and facile answer is that he was moved by a malignant desire to put a rival out of the way. On the whole, the evidence seems to support Napoleon's opinion that Robespierre was incapable of voting for the death of anybody in the world on grounds of personal enmity. And his acquiescence in the ruin of Danton is intelligible enough on the grounds of selfish policy. The Committee hated Danton for the good reason that he had openly attacked them, and his cry for clemency was an inflammatory and dangerous protest against their system. Now Robespierre, rightly or wrongly, had made up his mind that the Committee was the instrument by which, and which only, he could work out his own vague schemes of power and reconstruction. And, in any case, how could he resist the Committee? The famous insurrectionary force of Paris, which Danton had been the first to organise against a government, had just been chilled by the fall of the Hébertists. Least of all could this force be relied upon to rise in defence of the very chief whose every word for many weeks past had been a protest against the Communal leaders. In separating himself from the Ultras, Danton had cut off the great reservoir of his peculiar strength.

It may be said that the Convention was the proper centre of resistance to the designs of the Committee, and that if Danton and Robespierre had united their forces in the Convention they would have defeated Billaud and his allies. This seems to us more than doubtful. The Committee had acquired an immense preponderance over the Convention. They had been eminently successful in the immense tasks imposed upon them. They had the prestige not only of being the government—so great a thing in a country that had just emerged from the condition of a centralised monarchy; they had also the prestige of being a government that had done its work triumphantly. We are now in March. In July we shall find that Robespierre adopted the very policy that we are now discussing, of playing off the Convention against the Committee. In July that policy ended in his headlong fall. Why should it have been any more successful four months earlier?