The French Revolution

by Sir Charles Edward Mallet

The first step taken by the Jacobins, after the defeat of their opponents in the Convention, to conciliate public opinion in France, was the proclamation of a new constitution. The 'Constitution of '93,' which was destined never to come into force, was prepared under the guidance of Hérault de Séchelles, and was hurried through the Convention in the course of two or three weeks. More than any other of the revolutionary constitutions, it was conceived in the spirit of Rousseau, and embodied the Jacobin belief. In it the passion for electoral devices, the suspicious dread of executive power, the desire to refer every question to the immediate judgment of the people, already familiar to the Jacobin ideal, found their most positive expression. All rights, abstract and concrete, all arrangements, legislative and executive, administrative and judicial, military and financial, were restated and recast. All rulers, even the executive council of state, were to be nominated by popular election. All officials were limited to a very brief period of power. The qualification for the exercise of the suffrage was made as simple and as slight as possible, but by a somewhat curious exception to the theory of direct popular control, the system of double election in the case of most administrative officers was retained. Further, the powers both of the Executive and of the legislature were jealously guarded by a series of provisions, which gave the nation a veto on all important measures, by directing that every question of moment should be submitted to the assembled people. Never did any Parliament labour with more misplaced ingenuity to reduce its governors to impotence and to make their task impossible. 'The law,' declared the new constitution, 'must protect public and private liberties against the oppression of those who govern. When the Government violates the people's rights, insurrection is for the people, and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.'

It is instructive to notice what followed. No doubt, the new constitution was partly a tactical device invented to conciliate opinion. But it also genuinely set forth the doctrine which the Jacobins as followers of Rousseau held. It is one thing, however, to cherish a theory, and quite another thing to carry it out. At the moment when the Jacobins were proposing their extremely democratic system, which would have made a strong Government impossible, they found themselves confronted with a situation in which a strong Government was imperatively required. At the moment when they were proposing to the French people to annihilate all executive authority, they found themselves compelled to establish a despotic Executive, if they wished to save France and to preserve themselves. The conflict between Jacobin theory and the stern necessity of actual fact, could not have been better pointed. Forced to choose between the two, the Jacobins cast their theory to the winds, and the men who had for years been preaching that the rights of the governed were everything and the rights of the governors nothing, set to work to found a system, in which the governors claimed a power never paralleled before, and in which the governed could not establish even their right to live. The constitution passed the Convention before the end of June. In the next few weeks, by dint of great pressure, and in the face of the usual apathy among the voters, its ratification by the primary assemblies was secured. It seems that many voters voted for it, hoping that its adoption would necessitate a general election, and thus end the faction fights in Paris, and oust the Jacobins from power. The delegates of the primary assemblies were then convoked to Paris, and induced by careful management to ask that the dissolution of the Convention should be postponed till the end of the war. The Convention accepted the invitation of the patriots. The delegates returned full of enthusiasm to their homes, to rouse all Frenchmen to serve for the Republic. The democratic constitution was suspended, and the despotism of the Committee of Public Safety began.

Nominally, the Convention was still the chief authority in the State. But after the summer of 1793, it abdicated most of its powers. Its committees still did a great deal of work. The influence of certain members, of Cambon on questions of finance, and of Dubois-Crancé on questions of military organisation, was always very considerable. The great scheme of public education, which the Convention established on a generous scale, is a worthy monument of its labours. Its efforts to provide for the relief of the poor, to promote technical instruction, to develop science and art, to improve agriculture, to spread the knowledge of the French language, to found the telegraph system in France, to inaugurate the decimal system, and to establish uniformity of weights and measures, bear witness to the activity of the advanced party. Its bold attempt to reduce to order the chaos of French laws laid the foundations of the Civil Code. These points ought not to be forgotten in judging of the work of the Convention, for they show that there were zealous and useful reformers in its ranks. But still it must be admitted that the majority of members succumbed to the Terror as time went on. As far as possible they abstained from voting or from expressing any opinions at all. Their one endeavour was to escape notice, and to give a cordial acquiescence to any conditions which their masters imposed. Sieyès, once the busiest leader of the Assembly and inexhaustibly fertile in debate, lived by remaining obstinately mute. When an enemy denounced him at the Jacobin Club, his shoemaker saved his life by protesting that Sieyès never meddled with politics and did nothing but read his books. In the same way all other competitors for power were crushed. The administrative officials were rigorously sifted, and were deprived of political influence and of their more important functions. Municipal elections were suspended. The public service was filled with Sansculottes, and an immense number of new places were created for the supporters of the victorious party. The existing authorities having been thus reduced, the Revolutionary Government was organised in their stead. In September, after some vicissitudes, the new system was completed, and Terror was decreed to be 'the order of the day.'

The form of the Revolutionary Government was simple. At its head stood the Committee of Public Safety, the twelve kings of France. The members of this Committee were supreme in all matters foreign or domestic. They used the ministers as clerks and subordinates. They resorted only as a matter of form to the Convention. They were superior to all existing authorities, with unlimited powers, above the law. Immediately subordinate to the Great Committee were the two chief engines of its power—the Committee of General Security, under Amar and Vadier, Panis and Rühl, which superintended the police work of the Government, filled the prisons of Paris, and chose the victims for the scaffold, and the Revolutionary Tribunal, organised afresh in September upon a larger scale, ruled by such men as Herman, Coffinhal and Fouquier-Tinville, and acting through the guillotine. Behind these three important bodies were the various other agencies of the Terror. First, in Paris, there was the redoubtable Commune, directed by Pache, Hébert and Chaumette; the battalions of the Sections, once the National Guard, but now represented chiefly by their cannoneers, and placed under the command of Hanriot; the new Revolutionary Army of Sansculottes, formed in September, 1793, and supplying an additional force of six or seven thousand men; the Revolutionary Committees of the forty-eight Sections, carefully sifted, organised and paid; the Sectional meetings, now limited to two a week, and governed by a paid majority of Sansculottes; and the great organisation of the Jacobin Club. Then in the provinces, the Government was maintained by a similar system of close centralisation. Special Representatives on Mission were sent out armed with absolute powers to establish the terror in the great cities of France. Subordinate officers, organised later under the title of National Agents, were appointed to exercise similar powers in the less important towns. Revolutionary Committees, organised and paid, in every borough and considerable village, acted under the National Agents, and in close co-operation with the local clubs. And in some places revolutionary tribunals and revolutionary armies were formed on the model of those in Paris.

The heads of this extraordinary system were the Committee of Public Safety in Paris and the Representatives on Mission in the Departments. They were the men who created the Terror, and on them the chief responsibility rests. The Committee of Public Safety contained several different groups. Three of its most conspicuous members, who acted closely and consistently together, were Robespierre, Couthon and St. Just. These men were the idealists of the Committee, all fanatical disciples of Rousseau, all aiming at the regeneration of society and determined to secure the triumph of their principles by any means. Robespierre's wide popularity with the Jacobins, his character for respectability and virtue, and his position as the typical exponent of the party creed, made him an indispensable ally, although the more practical among his colleagues regarded his administrative capacities with contempt. Couthon, with his sweet voice and crippled body, and St. Just, with his handsome face and stern demeanour, supported Robespierre's schemes, with the same singular mixture of cruelty and sentiment, of shallow pedantry and deep conviction. But though the triumvirate afterwards grasped at power, and though they all took part in shaping the principles and policy of the Terror, their influence at first was by no means predominant, but was surpassed by that of many of their colleagues. Allied with them in the political work of the Committee, but more effective than they in securing its triumph, were Billaud-Varennes and Collot d'Herbois, the real organisers of the Terror, and among the fiercest of the ruthless men whom that system raised to power. Beside them stood the impressionable Barère, in some respects the most important member of the Government, who represented the Committee in the Convention, where his fluent tongue and easy temper made him popular, and Hérault de Séchelles the least important of the twelve, pre-eminent in courtliness and breeding, but most pre-eminent in society and love. The other five members of the Committee were men whose names with one exception are little known to-day, Lindet and Prieur of the Marne, charged with the work of provisioning the country, Jean Bon St. André, the reorganiser of the navy, and Carnot and Prieur of the Côte-d'Or, the organisers of the great campaigns, which did so much to save the Committee's reputation, and which in the eyes of many Frenchmen have half excused its faults.

In judging of this celebrated despotism no one should be permitted to forget its arduous labours, its intrepid patriotism, its devotion and success. The members of the Committee did not spare themselves. Those who had special departments to attend to, like Carnot and the Prieurs, Jean Bon St. André and Lindet, gave themselves up heart and soul to business, worked day and night, lived in their offices, dined sometimes on bread and water, and, engrossed in their overwhelming duties, left to others the field of political intrigue. All their vigour and abilities were thrown into the public service. They accepted the Terror, as a system which it was hopeless to resist, from necessity rather than from desire. But still they signed whatever their colleagues put before them, and they must share the responsibility with the rest. All the members of the Government lived at terrible pressure. The sword hung constantly over their heads. Universal distrust was the Jacobin shibboleth, and the genius of suspicion ruled in their camp. Every man knew that he was watched by his colleagues. Every man knew that his own turn might come next. 'You had your neighbour guillotined,' said Barère afterwards, 'in order to prevent his guillotining you.'

Under the control of the Committee of Public Safety and the direct supervision of Billaud-Varennes and Collot d'Herbois, the Representatives on Mission carried the Terror over France. The system of sending out members of the Convention on special missions to the army and the provinces had been freely adopted after the 10th August, and was widely developed by Jacobin rule. The deputies received the widest instructions from the Committee, which supported them through thick and thin. They had absolute power over life and property. They could remove and appoint officials, impose fines, levy taxes, imprison on suspicion, try, punish and execute their prisoners, and take any steps which they thought advisable to spread the Terror in the districts where they ruled. Such powers in the best hands would at all times be dangerously excessive; but confided, as they often were, to men without principle or moderation, at a time when political passion was furious, when suspicion was widespread and violence supreme, they were abused to an extent which even the authors of the system hardly contemplated, and which has rendered the annals of the Terror a black page in the history of mankind.

It is true that the character of their government was in some places milder than in others. Certain parts of France escaped. In several important towns there were no executions, though prisoners were sent up to be tried in Paris. In cities like Lyons, Marseilles and Toulon, which had raised the standard of revolt, there was a colourable pretext for severity. Some of the Commissioners, like Bô and Gouly, Lakanal and André Dumont, while indulging in ferocious language, contrived to mingle mercy with their bluster, and spared lives as often as they dared. Some, like Ysabeau, Lecarpentier and Albitte, were averse to wholesale executions, counted their victims by tens and not by hundreds, and were content in their excesses to be less sanguinary than absurd. Some, like Tallien, valued the dictatorship chiefly for the opportunities of spoil which it afforded. Some, like St. Just, were arbitrary only in insisting on conformity to their political ideals, or like Couthon, mitigated the justice of the Terror with schemes of benevolent philanthropy. Many of them seemed to act in a delirium. They all ran the risk of denunciation and lived in fear of death.

But when all exceptions are admitted, there remain only too many examples of the license and brutality by which the commissioners rendered their power supreme. Some of them seemed to take pleasure in showing how detestable tyranny could be. Even the wholesale executions were not always the worst feature of their rule. Collot d'Herbois and Fouché in Lyons, Lebon at Arras, Javoges at St. Etienne, and Carrier at Nantes, acquired an infamous celebrity above the rest. Others, like Lacombe in Bordeaux, Barras and Fréron in Marseilles and Toulon, Reynaud and Guyardin in the department of the Haute-Loire, Maignet in the Vaucluse, Dartigoyte in the Gers and the Landes, Borie in the Gard, and Bernard de Saintes and Léonard Bourdon in the Côte-d'Or, fell in demerit only behind the worst. Their despotism was less prodigal of life; but in contempt for decency, humanity and justice, few of their colleagues surpassed them. The first fury of the Terror was directed against the suspected and the wealthy, against priests, capitalists and aristocrats. But it rapidly passed on to others; and tradesmen and farmers, working men and working women supplied their tale of victims for the guillotine. 'I will convert this people into patriots,' cried Baudot; 'either they or I must die.' 'We will make France a cemetery,' echoed Carrier, 'rather than not regenerate it in our own way.'