But the State did not confine its interference to questions of property and labour. It undertook to regulate private conduct too. The old codes of faith and morality were swept aside. The old notions of family life were rejected. Robespierre protested against 'the domestic federalism which narrows the soul by keeping it isolated.' Marriages were made the loosest contracts. 'A man and woman who love each other are married,' cried St. Just. Paternal rights and duties were abolished. Patriots regarded it as contrary to liberty for a father to correct his child. The State undertook to educate its children on the most minute and rigid system, to see to their support, to carve out their inheritance, to dictate their morals, to form their opinions, to point out their God. Under the influence of the materialistic school which ruled in the Commune of Paris, and in particular of Chaumette, Hébert and Clootz, Christianity was proscribed. 'It will not be long,' cried an enthusiastic deputy, 'before the religion of Socrates, of Marcus Aurelius and Cicero will be the religion of the world.' With the sanction of the Convention, Reason was established as the faith of the Republic. On the 10th November, 1793, the Goddess of Reason was installed in the cathedral of Notre Dame. The churches were closed and plundered. Priests were compelled, on pain of persecution, to abdicate or to abjure their faith, and many scenes of license and disorder signalised the triumph of the rationalistic creed. The action of the Commune in Paris and of its representatives in the country districts created widespread indignation. 'The mischief is grave, and the wound deep,' wrote a Jacobin politician to Robespierre from Lyons. 'Stupor, grief and consternation are depicted upon every face. The dying man sends for the minister of religion to speak the words of peace and consolation, and the minister is threatened with the guillotine if he goes to perform this duty of humanity. Such is the reality of our freedom!'
Besides the Christian religion the Terrorists repudiated the Christian era. The new Calendar dated from the 22nd September, 1792, the day of the proclamation of the French Republic, which became the first day of the first year of Liberty. The old months, weeks and days were abolished. The year was divided into twelve new months, each consisting of thirty days,—Vendémiaire, Brumaire, Frimaire for the autumn; Nivôse, Pluviôse, Ventôse for the winter; Germinal, Floréal, Prairial for the spring; and Messidor, Thermidor, Fructidor for the summer. Each month was divided into three decades, and the five days over at the end of the year were consecrated to public festivals. With the customs of the old world its manners disappeared. In order to enforce social equality, all classes were compelled to adopt the habits, dress and language of the Sansculottes. Red caps, sabots and rough clothing became essential signs of patriotism. The graces and courtesies of life were penal. 'It is not safe,' wrote a Parisian, as early as September, 1792, 'to walk the streets in decent clothes.' The old forms of address disappeared and gave place to fraternal greetings. The real aristocracy of nature and education shared the proscription of the accidental aristocracy of birth. 'The French people,' boasted Robespierre, 'have outstripped the rest of humanity by two thousand years.... In the rest of Europe a ploughman or artisan is an animal formed for the pleasures of the noble. In France the nobles are trying to transform themselves into ploughmen and artisans, but do not succeed in obtaining that honour.' Among other strange and trivial changes, the adoption of new names came into fashion, names borrowed often from the heroes of antiquity. Brutus, Anaxagoras and Scipio-Solon figured in the popular nomenclature of the day. On the staff of the Revolutionary Tribunal one member took the name of Tenth-of-August; another styled himself Mucius Scaevola; and a third became Sempronius Gracchus.
Apart from these absurdities, which are only worth recording because they illustrate the extraordinary character of the times, the natural consequences attended the Terrorists' interference with the rules of private conduct. No nation can with impunity cast its prejudices and beliefs behind it. No nation can accept without suffering a brand new code of morality and ethics even at the hands of well-intentioned men. The result was moral disorder. When respect for conventions was proscribed, respect for discipline and self-restraint went with it. Parents lamented the insubordination of their children. Vice showed itself more often unashamed. Encouraged by the legislation of the Terror, the statistics of illegitimacy enormously increased. In the year VI of the Republic there were more divorces than marriages in France.
No doubt in many cases the action of the Terrorists was based upon honest conviction. Certain members of the Government, like St. Just and Robespierre, were idealists convinced that their tyranny was needed to secure the reign of virtue in the world. Even among the politicians of the Commune, from whom emanated most of the socialist experiments and most of the extreme measures of the Terror, and with whom many of its worst instruments were closely allied, there were, no doubt, some men who, like Chaumette, meditated projects of benevolent philanthropy for the reform of criminals, the alleviation of suffering and the suppression of vice. These men saw round about them grave inequalities and serious distress. They wished to render social wrong impossible, and to make all men happy, patriotic and enlightened on the spot. They wished to break down conventions which sometimes worked hardship, and to banish what they regarded as the superstitions of the past. And thus, having seized on absolute power, they used it to found their dimly-seen ideal by desperate measures and in desperate haste.
But while making full allowance for the intentions of these men, and passing over for the moment their ruinous unwisdom, we cannot shut our eyes to the methods which they used. Political passion warps history to its uses, and writers who have sympathised with the Terrorist ideals, have too often refused to consider anything else. But after all, these men were a small minority, whose maxims their colleagues adopted, but whose scruples they pushed aside. It is not by the hopes of a few theorists, but by the actions and character of the practical agents of the Terror that that system must be judged. And it is on the ground of their actions and character that the Terrorists as a party stand condemned. The overwhelming evidence of their own statements, of official papers and of judicial reports cannot be rejected as idle slander. No doubt some of them acted in a delirium, under an imminent sense of peril and at the risk of death. No doubt they all suffered from that blunting of the moral sense, which the reckless excitement of the Revolution seems to have produced in many minds, which alone rendered the Terror possible, and which is so conspicuous in Napoleon, the Revolution's conqueror and child. But still, admitting all excuses, the record of the Terrorists is dark. Some of them, at the head, were dangerous zealots, and some were colourless or unwilling assistants. But many of them, especially the subordinate agents and those who were ranked among the followers of Hébert, were ignorant and unprincipled, cruel and corrupt.
One characteristic of the party was the license which marked their speech and conduct. Coarseness of language was not uncommon among Jacobin politicians, and even the greatest of them, like Danton, shared it. In many cases the habit was not natural, but was deliberately affected for a political purpose, and cultivated as a sign of democracy and in order to win popularity with the mob. It was in men like Hébert and his allies that this contemptible fashion reached its climax. Hébert made his political reputation by it. His journal, the Père Duchesne, which raised him to notoriety and power, was started with the express intention of appealing to the obscene tastes of the multitude, and its scandalous impurity has probably never been surpassed. Of what calibre must the men have been who were driven to such methods of acquiring fame? Their language, however, would have mattered little, had it not been so often reflected in their conduct, and had they not possessed the power to abolish, with the aid of the guillotine, all those laws and decorums by which society protects itself. Hébert had no lack of imitators among the men whom the Terror raised to power. Guffroy, a member of the Committee of General Security, started a paper in the same style. Javogues and Dartigoyte, Vacheron, Laplanche and others preached and adopted in the departments the morality of Père Duchesne, and those below them in the hierarchy of the Terror rivalled or exceeded the example of their chiefs. Nor can one overlook the ferocity which so many Terrorists displayed. The records of despotism contain few things which surpass the sanguinary rigour of Collot d'Herbois, Fréron and Lebon, the iniquities permitted by Ronsin, the hero of the Revolutionary Army, and by Fouquier-Tinville, the hero of the Revolutionary Tribunal, the cynical cruelty of a Fouché watching a massacre from a window, lorgnette in hand, the savagery of a Carrier, who declared that he had never laughed so much in his life as he did at the contortions of his victims, the pitiless fanaticism of a Robespierre, who, after ten months of the Terror, insisted on fresh legislation for simplifying trials and facilitating death, the terrible ingenuity of a Vadier, who invented the idea of getting up conspiracies in the prisons so as to furnish more victims for the scaffold, or the barbarity of a Government which, while endorsing this iniquitous device, proposed to shoot all its prisoners of war, and would have done so, had not its own officers refused to carry the order out.
But if some of the leading Terrorists were worthless, many of their subordinates were worse. The character of the men who carried out the system in the Sections of Paris and in the towns and villages of France, who governed the clubs, ruled the committees and composed the armed force, was generally unredeemed by any larger public motives. Not only were they very rough and ignorant, but they were necessarily men without scruples. No others would perform the duties of the Terror or execute the orders that came from above. Their powers being enormous, their opportunities for tyranny and plunder were unlimited, and those opportunities were constantly abused. Money levied recklessly upon the rich never reached the coffers of the State. Salaries were multiplied to an extraordinary degree. Cambon, speaking for the Treasury, bore witness to the wholesale peculation. A hundred other witnesses have brought forward instances of corruption and excess, and even of debauchery and crime. The armed force on which the small minority of Terrorists relied to maintain their precarious authority, freely enlisted the most ruffianly recruits. Their own general described them as 'scoundrels and brigands,' and excused himself by pleading that 'honest men could not be found to undertake such work.' Such a class exists in every country, especially in countries that have been long mis-ruled; but civilised communities place it under strict restraint. The Jacobins, on the other hand, invited it to govern, and invested it with despotic powers. It is noticeable that many of the Jacobin agents were men who had failed in the ordinary walks of life, and who were consequently bitter against social laws. In their compassion for suffering and their contempt for the magic of wealth, the Jacobins fell into the opposite excess, professed to find magic in poverty, and regarded ignorance and destitution as entitled to honour in themselves. Recalling the doctrine of their master, that in a state of Nature men's instincts are good, they refused to recognise the frailty of humanity, and forgot that misfortune is sometimes due to fault. Strange as the truth appears, it would seem to be indisputably proved that under the Terror the Government of France fell largely into the hands of the unscrupulous and worthless, and that the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, once welcomed with such pure enthusiasm, came to mean the tyranny of the lowest of the people, not only of the lowest in wealth and station—that would not have mattered—but of the lowest in education and capacity, in nature and in morals too.
It is difficult to believe that Carnot and Lindet, or even Robespierre and St. Just, could have cordially approved of such a system. But that they sanctioned it is clear. Some, like Carnot, shut their eyes, feeling that it was no use to interfere. Others, like St. Just and Robespierre, took refuge in their resolutely blind fanaticism. 'Patriots' could not do wrong, and if their own friends brought them proof to the contrary, they refused, except in the grossest cases, to listen or believe. They had to use such weapons as they could find, and they comforted their consciences with general declarations. 'The Jacobins,' cried Collot d'Herbois, 'are compassionate, humane and generous. These virtues, however, they reserve for patriots who are their brethren, and not for aristocrats.' Most of them believed the Terror to be needed. 'It is necessary,' said Billaud, 'that the people should be created anew.' Even Jean Bon St. André insisted that, in order to establish the ideal Republic, half the population of France must be destroyed. 'Our purpose,' Robespierre steadily protested, 'is to substitute morality for egotism, honesty for honour, principles for usages, ... the empire of reason for the tyranny of fashion, ... nobleness for vanity, love of glory for the love of gain,' but in order to fulfil their virtuous purpose, the Terrorists called in the help of the depraved.
These considerations may serve to explain the catastrophe of the leaders of the Terror. So far as their experiments were honest and high-motived, they will always be of interest to the world. But even as reformers their failure was complete. The effects of their desperate action were disastrous. Their methods utterly discredited their cause, and occasioned an infinite amount of suffering to France. And while in part, no doubt, they failed through ignorance, they failed chiefly because so many of them were bad men. In the end, the Terrorists did little materially or morally to raise the level of life, little to advance the equality which they longed for, and to which men march through order, not through crime. Of all their work, strenuous and heroic as it often was, only one part, the war, entirely prospered. For under the Terror Frenchmen threw into the war the irresistible enthusiasm which the Revolution had created, and which they could no longer feel for politics at home. The Terror was never sanctioned by France, and it never will receive the sanction of posterity. To assume that it was necessary is only one among the many sophisms which weak and well-intentioned men advance for palliating wrong. Even the excuse of national peril was wanting, for the ease with which the Jacobins in Paris subdued their enemies in the summer of 1793, shows how powerful their position was, and in the winter of that year all serious danger of invasion disappeared. The Terror was necessary to keep the Terrorists in power, and to enable them to carry out their views. But it was necessary for no other purpose, and certainly not for the salvation of France.