How can we speak with decent patience of a man who seriously thought that he should conciliate the conservative and theological elements of the society at his feet, by such an odious opera-piece as the Feast of the Supreme Being? This was designed as a triumphant ripost to the Feast of Reason, which Chaumette and his friends had celebrated in the winter. The energumens of the Goddess of Reason had now been some weeks in their bloody graves; by this time, if they had given the wrong answer to the supreme enigma, their eyes would perhaps be opened. Robespierre persuaded the Convention to decree an official recognition of the Supreme Being, and to attend a commemorative festival in honour of their mystic patron. He contrived to be chosen president for the decade in which the festival would fall. When the day came (20th Prairial, June 8, 1794), he clothed himself with more than even his usual care. As he looked out from the windows of the Tuileries upon the jubilant crowd in the gardens, he was intoxicated with enthusiasm. 'O Nature,' he cried, 'how sublime thy power, how full of delight! How tyrants must grow pale at the idea of such a festival as this!' In pontifical pride he walked at the head of the procession, with flowers and wheat-ears in his hand, to the sound of chants and symphonies and choruses of maidens. On the first of the great basins in the gardens, David, the artist, had devised an allegorical structure for which an inauspicious doom was prepared. Atheism, a statue of life size, was throned in the midst of an amiable group of human Vices, with Madness by her side, and Wisdom menacing them with lofty wrath. Great are the perils of symbolism. Robespierre applied a torch to Atheism, but alas, the wind was hostile, or else Atheism and Madness were damp. They obstinately resisted the torch, and it was hapless Wisdom who took fire. Her face, all blackened by smoke, grinned a hideous ghastly grin at her sturdy rivals. The miscarriage of the allegory was an evil omen, and men probably thought how much better the churchmen always managed their conjurings and the art of spectacle. There was a great car drawn by milk-white oxen; in the front were ranged sheaves of golden grain, while at the back shepherds and shepherdesses posed with scenic graces. The whole mummery was pagan. It was a bringing back of Cerealia and Thesmophoria to earth. It stands as the most disgusting and contemptible anachronism in history.
The famous republican Calendar, with its Prairials and Germinals, its Ventoses and Pluvioses, was an anachronism of the same kind, though it was less despicable in its manifestation. Its philosophic base was just as retrograde and out of season as the fooleries of the Feast of the Supreme Being. The association of worship and sacredness with the fruits of the earth, with the forces of nature, with the power and variety of the elements, could only be sincere so long as men really thought of all these things as animated each by a special will of its own. Such an association became mere charlatanry, when knowledge once passed into the positive stage. How could men go back to adore an outer world, after they had found out the secret that it is a mere huge group of phenomena, following fixed courses, and not obeying spontaneous and unaccountable volitions of their own? And what could be more puerile than the fanciful connection of the Supreme Being with a pastoral simplicity of life? This simplicity was gone, irrecoverably gone, with the passage from nomad times to the complexities of a modern society. To typify, therefore, the Supreme Being as specially interested in shocks of grain and in shepherds and shepherdesses was to make him a mere figure in an idyll, the ornament of a rural mask, a god of the garden, instead of the sovereign director of the universal forces, and stern master of the destinies of men. Chaumette's commemoration of the Divinity of Reason was a sensible performance, compared with Robespierre's farcical repartee. It was something, as Comte has said, to select for worship man's most individual attribute. If they could not contemplate society as a whole, it was at least a gain to pay homage to that faculty in the human rulers of the world, which had brought the forces of nature—its pluviosity, nivosity, germinality, and vendemiarity—under the yoke for the service of men.
If the philosophy of Robespierre's pageant was so retrograde and false, its politics were still more inane. It is a monument of presumptuous infatuation that any one should feel so strongly as he did that order could only be restored on condition of coming to terms with religious use and prejudice, and then that he should dream that his Supreme Being—a mere didactic phrase, the deity of a poet's georgic—should adequately replace that eternal marvel of construction, by means of which the great churchmen had wrought dogma and liturgy and priest and holy office into every hour and every mood of men's lives. There is no binding principle of human association in a creed with this one bald article. 'In truth,' as I have said elsewhere of such deism as Robespierre's, 'one can scarcely call it a creed. It is mainly a name for a particular mood of fine spiritual exaltation; the expression of a state of indefinite aspiration and supreme feeling for lofty things. Are you going to convert the new barbarians of our western world with this fair word of emptiness? Will you sweeten the lives of suffering men, and take its heaviness from that droning piteous chronicle of wrong and cruelty and despair, which everlastingly saddens the compassionating ear like moaning of a midnight sea; will you animate the stout of heart with new fire, and the firm of hand with fresh joy of battle, by the thought of a being without intelligible attributes, a mere abstract creation of metaphysic, whose mercy is not as our mercy, nor his justice as our justice, nor his fatherhood as the fatherhood of men? It was not by a cold, a cheerless, a radically depraving conception such as this, that the church became the refuge of humanity in the dark times of old, but by the representation, to men sitting in bondage and confusion, of godlike natures moving among them, under figure of the most eternally touching of human relations,—a tender mother ever interceding for them, and an elder brother laying down his life that their burdens might be loosened.'
On the day of the Feast of the Supreme Being, the guillotine was concealed in the folds of rich hangings. It was the Twentieth of Prairial. Two days later Couthon proposed to the Convention the memorable Law of the Twenty-second Prairial. Robespierre was the draftsman, and the text of it still remains in his own writing. This monstrous law is simply the complete abrogation of all law. Of all laws ever passed in the world it is the most nakedly iniquitous. Tyrants have often substituted their own will for the ordered procedure of a tribunal, but no tyrant before ever went through the atrocious farce of deliberately making a tribunal the organised negation of security for justice. Couthon laid its theoretic base in a fallacy that must always be full of seduction to shallow persons in authority: 'He who would subordinate the public safety to the inventions of jurisconsults, to the formulas of the Court, is either an imbecile or a scoundrel.' As if public safety could mean anything but the safety of the public. The author of the Law of Prairial had forgotten the minatory word of the sage to whom he had gone on a pilgrimage in the days of his youth. 'All becomes legitimate and even virtuous,' Helvétius had written, 'on behalf of the public safety.' Rousseau inscribed on the margin, 'The public safety is nothing, unless individuals enjoy security.' What security was possible under the Law of Prairial?
After the probity and good judgment of the tribunal, the two cardinal guarantees in state trials are accurate definition, and proof. The offence must be capable of precise description, and the proof against an offender must conform to strict rule. The Law of Prairial violently infringed all three of these essential conditions of judicial equity. First, the number of the jury who had power to convict was reduced. Second, treason was made to consist in such vague and infinitely elastic kinds of action as inspiring discouragement, misleading opinion, depraving manners, corrupting patriots, abusing the principles of the Revolution by perfidious applications. Third, proof was to lie in the conscience of the jury; there was an end of preliminary inquiry, of witnesses in defence, and of counsel for the accused. Any kind of testimony was evidence, whether material or moral, verbal or written, if it was of a kind 'likely to gain the assent of a man of reasonable mind.'
Now what was Robespierre's motive in devising this infernal instrument? The theory that he loved judicial murder for its own sake, can only be held by the silliest of royalist or clerical partisans. It is like the theory of the vulgar kind of Protestantism, that Mary Tudor or Philip of Spain had a keen delight in shedding blood. Robespierre, like Mary and like Philip, would have been as well pleased if all the world would have come round to his mind without the destruction of a single life. The true inquisitor is a creature of policy, not a man of blood by taste. What, then, was the policy that inspired the Law of Prairial? To us the answer seems clear. We know what was the general aim in Robespierre's mind at this point in the history of the Revolution. His brother Augustin was then the representative of the Convention with the army of Italy, and General Bonaparte was on terms of close intimacy with him. Bonaparte said long afterwards, when he was expiating a life of iniquity on the rock of Saint Helena, that he saw long letters from Maximilian to Augustin Robespierre, all blaming the Conventional Commissioners—Tallien, Fouché, Barras, Collot, and the rest—for the horrors they perpetrated, and accusing them of ruining the Revolution by their atrocities. Again, there is abundant testimony that Robespierre did his best to induce the Committee of Public Safety to bring those odious malefactors to justice. The text of the Law itself discloses the same object. The vague phrases of depraving manners and applying revolutionary principles perfidiously, were exactly calculated to smite the band of violent men whose conduct was to Robespierre the scandal of the Revolution. And there was a curious clause in the law as originally presented, which deprived the Convention of the right of preventing measures against its own members. Robespierre's general design in short was to effect a further purgation of the Convention. There is no reason to suppose that he deliberately aimed at any more general extermination. On the other hand, it is incredible that, as some have maintained, he should merely have had in view the equalisation of rich and poor before the tribunals, by withdrawing the aid of counsel and testimony to civic character from both rich and poor alike.
If Robespierre's design was what we believe it to have been, the result was a ghastly failure. The Committee of Public Safety would not consent to apply his law against the men for whom he had specially designed it. The frightful weapon which he had forged was seized by the Committee of General Security, and Paris was plunged into the fearful days of the Great Terror. The number of persons put to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal before the Law of Prairial had been comparatively moderate. From the creation of the tribunal in April 1793, down to the execution of the Hébertists in March 1794, the number of persons condemned to death was 505. From the death of the Hébertists down to the death of Robespierre, the number of the condemned was 2158. One half of the entire number of victims, namely, 1356, were guillotined after the Law of Prairial. No deadlier instrument was ever invented by the cruelty of man. Innocent women no less than innocent men, poor no less than rich, those in whom life was almost spent, no less than those in whom its pulse was strongest, virtuous no less than vicious, were sent off in woe-stricken batches all those summer days. A man was informed against; he was seized in his bed at five in the morning; at seven he was taken to the Conciergerie; at nine he received information of the charge against him; at ten he went into the dock; by two in the afternoon he was condemned; by four his head lay in the executioner's basket.
What stamps the system of the Terror at this date with a wickedness that cannot be effaced, is that at no moment was the danger from foreign or domestic foe less serious. We may always forgive something to well-grounded panic. The proscriptions of an earlier date in Paris were not excessively sanguinary, if we remember that the city abounded in royalists and other reactionists, who were really dangerous in fomenting discouragement and spreading confusion. If there ever is an excuse for martial law, and it must be rare, the French government were warranted in resorting to it in 1793. Paris in those days was like a city beleaguered, and the world does not use very harsh words about the commandant of a besieged town who puts to death traitors found within his walls. Opinion in England at this very epoch encouraged the Tory government to pass a Treason Bill, which introduced as vague a definition of treasonable offence as even the Law of Prairial itself. Windham did not shrink from declaring in parliament that he and his colleagues were determined to exact 'a rigour beyond the law.' And they were as good as their word. The Jacobins had no monopoly either of cruel law or cruel breach of law in the eighteenth century. Only thirty years before, opinion in Pennsylvania had prompted a hideous massacre of harmless Indians as a deed acceptable to God, and the grandson of William Penn proclaimed a bounty of fifty dollars for the scalp of a female Indian, and three times as much for a male. A man would have had quite as good a chance of justice from the Revolutionary Tribunal, as at the hands of Braxfield, the Scotch judge, who condemned Muir and Palmer for sedition in 1793, and who told the government, with a brazen front worthy of Carrier or Collot d'Herbois themselves, that, if they would only send him prisoners, he would find law for them.
We have no sympathy with the spirit of paradox that has arisen in these days, amusing itself by the vindication of bad men. We think that the author of the Law of Prairial was a bad man. But it is time that there should be an end of the cant which lifts up its hands at the crimes of republicans and freethinkers, and shuts its eyes to the crimes of kings and churches. Once more, we ought to rise into a higher air; we ought to condemn, wherever we find it, whether on the side of our adversaries or on our own, all readiness to substitute arbitrary force for the processes of ordered justice. There are moments when such a readiness may be leniently judged, but Prairial of 1794 was not one of them either in France or in England. And what makes the crime of this law more odious, is its association with the official proclamation of the State worship of a Supreme Being. The scene of Robespierre's holy festival becomes as abominable as a catholic Auto-da-fé, where solemn homage was offered to the God of pity and loving-kindness, while flame glowed round the limbs of the victims.