The French Revolution

by Sir Charles Edward Mallet

Meanwhile another organisation, destined to give the Jacobins command of the capital, had been growing up in Paris. The Revolution had restored to Paris the local freedom of which the monarchy had stripped her, and one of the first objects of Parisian politicians had been to establish a municipality in the capital. After the taking of the Bastille, the informal Assembly of Parisian electors, which, in the collapse of the old system, had temporarily usurped administrative power, was replaced by a more regular body, entitled 'The Three Hundred,' elected by the various districts, and charged with the task of preparing a permanent constitution for the city. It was this body—The Three Hundred—which, with Bailly at its head, had governed Paris during the year that followed, and which by its somewhat irritating action had earned unpopularity with the poor. But on the whole, in spite of many mistakes, and in the face of many difficulties, it did useful and necessary work. However, in the early autumn of 1790, this body was replaced by a new system which remained the responsible government of Paris until the reaction after the Terror. Under it, the city was divided into forty-eight Sections. The Sections elected a number of representatives, who formed the municipal council, and some of whom formed the municipal executive[7]. At the head of the whole organisation was the Mayor, elected by the votes of the citizens of Paris. The Mayor, as the head of this great organisation, became an official of the first importance. The National Guard was under his orders. The resources of the capital were at his command. He and his council controlled the politics of Paris, and the politics of Paris governed France. Besides that, each of the forty-eight Sections had its own elected authority, a permanent committee of sixteen members, to carry out the orders of the municipal body, invested with some powers of administration and police. The Jacobins, in accordance with their theory, argued that all the Sectional Assemblies ought to sit permanently, that the active citizens ought to meet every day, and that the municipality ought daily to take their opinions on current questions. The sovereign people, they declared, could not properly delegate their authority to representatives. The more practical theory, however, of representative government carried the day. But the Jacobins carried a clause which provided that the voters of any Section should assemble, whenever fifty active citizens in that Section demanded it, and that all the forty-eight Sections should assemble, if eight of them simultaneously presented a request. The result was that, in quarters where Jacobin views prevailed, and especially in the poorer Sections of Paris, the Sectional Assemblies were constantly meeting, and urging their opinions on the municipal body. When the majority in the quieter Sections ceased to take an active part in politics, the revolutionary Sections were able, by persistent pressure and by resorting to violence and riot, to manipulate the municipal elections, to dictate to the municipal body, and ultimately to control that great organisation and to use its forces for the furtherance of their views.

The death of Mirabeau prepared the way for the accession of the Jacobin leaders to power. Even before that, Robespierre was a familiar figure in the Assembly, but during the summer months of 1791, his influence and importance in it steadily increased. From the first, he had been the most conspicuous advocate of Rousseau's theory, the most deeply convinced exponent of the Jacobin belief. His principles were to his mind absolutely clear. To gain complete equality for men, to protest in the name of justice against any law which permitted considerations of circumstance or necessity to interfere with abstract rights, to establish in the world the reign of sentimental logic, based on the philosophy of the Contrat Social, this was his unwavering creed. It governed his hopes, his policy, his life. He loved to expound its principles, to revel in its phrases, to declaim about its fine desires. He never tired of speaking, and this, in one shape or another, always was his theme. The Assembly might laugh or chatter, audiences might come and go, but nothing checked the rhetoric of Robespierre. His self-complacency was as intense as his faith. He was the chosen minister of Virtue, to preach its gospel to the regenerated world. That seems to have been his profound conviction, and that was unquestionably the foundation of his strength.

There is little doubt that in this respect the man was honest. His weak sentiment was real. His love of order and of decency was genuine. His incorruptibility was known and rare. His conceit was phenomenal. His power of self-deception was unbounded. On the whole, Robespierre was faithful to his theories. He was capable, as he showed on more than one occasion, of attacking popular proposals, if they seemed to him opposed to principle. He did not, it is true, denounce the lawlessness and outrage which he naturally detested; but his reticence was probably due, less to the calculations of a subtle policy, than to his singular faculty of persuading himself, whenever riots or massacres occurred, that it was only the people executing justice, and that the justice of the people must be right. Robespierre never took the lead at critical moments, when decisive action was needed. He was constitutionally nervous and undecided. He had none of the audacity which made Danton great. Fearless in sophistry, he was timid in action. On certain occasions it is very difficult to free him from the charge of cowardice, and yet it is possible that his hesitation arose chiefly from the necessity, which he always felt, of reconciling his action with his theory, before he could act with a clear conscience. In disguising crime in the panoply of virtue, so satisfactorily as to deceive himself, Robespierre had no peer. The Jacobin theory set above the law the action of the sovereign people. That action showed itself in riots. Those riots involved terrorism and loss of life. If consequences of that kind followed, they could not be prevented. Only the depravity of human nature, which rendered them necessary, must be deplored. Thus Robespierre, the high-priest of the doctrine, was always the readiest to defend it, to throw over every lawless action the mask of verbal sentiment and virtue. And thus he became the leader of his party. His policy was ultimately the most deadly, because its desperate logic was the outcome of a theory which could do no wrong. If statesmanship be the compromise of theories with facts, Robespierre was essentially no statesman, for to his fatal and narrow idealism any compromise with the realities round him was unknown.

The summer of 1791 is the critical period in the fortunes of the rival parties. When the majority lost in Mirabeau their strongest leader, Robespierre, the chief of the new party, came to the front. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that at this time the future was still undecided, and the Jacobin triumph by no means secured. Had the party in power possessed a few men of practical vigour and wisdom, it seems just possible that the Revolution might have paused, and might have been guided into the path of ordered freedom. But they had no organisation. They did not see their danger. They had no experience to help them, and Mirabeau was dead. The King's unfortunate flight to Varennes in June, and the manifesto in which he set forth his grave complaints against the Revolution, played into the hands of the advanced party. It greatly increased the difficulties of the majority, who desired to keep Louis on the throne. It was followed by an outbreak of Jacobin activity, which, however, displayed many varieties of view. Danton and the Cordeliers, Brissot and Desmoulins boldly demanded the establishment of a republic, but their opinions were not shared by all their party. Marat proposed the appointment of a Dictator to put all his enemies to death. The partisans of the Duke of Orleans declared for Louis' deposition, with the object of securing the throne for the Duke. But the declarations of the Jacobin Club were curiously uncertain. They demanded Louis' deposition, but they hesitated to propose the abolition of the throne. On the 1st of July, at a session of the Club, Billaud-Varennes was not allowed even to speak on behalf of a republic. Some days later, on the evening of the 13th, influenced possibly by the reaction in the Assembly, Robespierre came forward and declared that he personally was not a republican, and that 'the word republic did not signify any particular form of government'; while even Danton avoided the question and confined himself to attacks upon the inviolability of the king.

The majority in the Assembly took advantage of the divisions among their opponents to assert their views. Barnave and the Lameths, and the party which they directed, rallied to the support of the new Constitution. In vain the Republicans protested. Deserted by the Jacobin Club, ill-supported by their leaders, closely watched by Lafayette, they attempted to keep alive the agitation by a demonstration, on the 17th July, in the Champ de Mars. The object was to secure signatures for a monster petition demanding the dethronement of the king. It does not appear that the objects of the gathering were sinister or dangerous; but the disorder of the time, the furious language in which Marat, Desmoulins and other advanced leaders incited the people to violence, and the difficulties of their own position, naturally alarmed the Constitutional party. The municipality, taking its cue from the Assembly, determined to put the demonstration down; and, owing to blunders which cannot well be explained, but which can easily be imagined, the result was a fierce and sanguinary disturbance, ending in serious loss of life. How far Lafayette and Bailly were to blame for their conduct, or whether it is fair to impute blame to them at all, will always be matter for discussion. But it is most instructive to notice the effects which the 'massacre of the Champ de Mars' produced. It was the one occasion in the history of the Revolution when the party of order, rightly or wrongly, decisively asserted themselves, and it shows convincingly how strong they were, had they realised their strength and known how to use it. For the moment their triumph was complete. The Republican agitation collapsed. The leaders who inspired it, but who had kept in the background, suddenly disappeared from politics. Danton, under threats of prosecution, retired to the country. Robespierre summarily changed his lodgings. Marat hid himself and prepared to escape to England. Desmoulins suspended the issue of his paper. The Constitutional party opened a new club called the Feuillants, and many of the Jacobins joined it at once. Of the three hundred deputies who were members of the Jacobin Club, all but seven retired. And Louis was successfully re-established on the throne. Had the majority possessed any vigour or cohesion, they might conceivably have stamped out the Jacobin movement, and have secured the freedom which they fancied they had won.

Instead of that, they threw away their victory. Barnave, Malouet and a few other members of the majority did make an attempt to organise their party, and some idea of an effectual revision of the Constitution was entertained. But it ended in nothing. The fatal want of union and of practical ability which characterised the party, their lack of definiteness and insight, their fondness for glib talk and theory, frustrated the idea. Slowly but steadily, Robespierre's influence reasserted itself in the Assembly. The Jacobin leaders returned to public life, and resumed their tactics unimpeded. The only permanent results of the 17th July were to widen the breach between the party in power and the party which was still excluded, and to leave in the minds of those who had suffered, and in the great mass of the poor who sympathised with them, abidingly bitter memories of injustice calling for expiation and revenge.

The reviving influence of the Jacobins was clearly seen in September and October, 1791. Helped by the blind fatuity of the royalists, they were able to carry a resolution rendering members of the existing legislature ineligible for election to the next, and thus driving their most active opponents, for a time at any rate, out of power. The revision of the Constitution told slightly against them, but it came to very little, and all its worst faults were retained. When the Constituent Assembly separated at the end of September, Robespierre and Pétion, not Lafayette or Barnave, were its heroes with the populace of Paris. And in the months which followed, the power of their party increased. In spite of the motion which the majority of the Assembly had passed just before its dissolution, forbidding the affiliation of popular clubs and their interference in the general election, the Jacobin clubs rapidly multiplied, and threw all their energies into the electoral contest. The abolition of the property qualification for deputies had already been secured by the persistence of Robespierre. The retirement of Lafayette from the chief command of the National Guard, and the abolition of that post as a permanent office, considerably weakened the Constitutional party. The growing sense of weariness with politics, and the desire to rest from agitation felt by the bulk of the people, began to show itself more distinctly. The renewal of the whole of the legislature and of one-half of all the local officials, afforded an opportunity for many moderate and experienced men to retire, and for more pushing and ambitious politicians to fill their places. The number of elections, and the fact that they were held so near together, prevented many voters from recording their votes. The necessity of taking the oath to observe the new ecclesiastical system disfranchised a large number of scrupulous Catholics. The intimidation practised by the Jacobins against all reactionary voters, of which there are clear examples but the effects of which it is difficult to estimate, must have kept many quiet people away. All over France the proportion of voters who came forward to vote was very small. The result showed, in the new Assembly, a considerable increase in the advanced party, and many new-comers who hurried at once to join the Jacobin Club. But it showed also that the majority of voters loyally adhered to the new Constitution, were fully prepared to give it a trial, and were well represented even in Paris itself.

Unhappily, however, for France, the majority never found the time to rally. From the end of 1791, the shadow of war began to darken the political horizon. At the critical moment, when the nation had to choose between the majority, which wished to consolidate the new system, and the minority, which wanted to destroy it for something else, the alarm of invasion redoubled the panic and disorder, paralysed any possible reaction, and threw Frenchmen off their balance again. The war with Europe meant a struggle both for freedom and for national existence. In the tumult of that struggle all other considerations were flung to the winds. And the men who could best save the Revolution and maintain the honour of the country became the heroes and the tyrants of France.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] The 144 representatives of the Sections formed the General Council of the Commune; 48 of these formed the municipal body; and 16 of these were the actual Administrators, distributed among five departments, of 'subsistence,' 'police,' 'finance,' 'public establishments,' and 'public works.' See Mortimer-Ternaux's Histoire de la Terreur, vol. i. Appendix III, where the whole subject is thoroughly discussed.