The Reaction.
With the fall of Robespierre the Terror came to an end. The men who overthrew him were many of them worse men than he. They did not intend to repudiate his system. They had acted from personal motives, from a desire to save their lives and to maintain themselves in power. But without Robespierre the Terror could not continue. It was his reputation for moral earnestness and for disinterested conviction which alone had reconciled to it many honest, narrow-minded men, who accepted his theory, believed in his sincerity, and had not the capacity to criticise his actions. In him and his associates the principles of the Terror perished. There remained no one to throw over the system the veil of sentimental virtue, and without that veil its uglier aspects stood disclosed. Men who to the last had respected Robespierre could not respect Collot d'Herbois or Billaud-Varennes. The Convention which had revolted against Robespierre was not likely, when once it had tasted freedom, to replace on its neck the yoke of his colleagues. The Committee of Public Safety had appeared irresistible so long as it was undivided. But when it broke up into parties and appealed to the Convention to protect it, its dictatorship necessarily expired.
Accordingly, in the weeks which followed the 9th Thermidor, a number of measures testified to the growing reaction. The Committee of Public Safety was remodelled, and a system was enforced under which three of its members retired, without the right of re-election, every month. The Convention and its Committees resumed the powers of government. The Revolutionary Tribunal was reconstituted and the law of the 22nd Prairial repealed. The redoubtable Commune was abolished, and for purposes of local government Paris was placed under the authority of the Department of the Seine. The staff of the National Guard was reorganised. The Revolutionary Committees in Paris and elsewhere were reduced in number and shorn of their powers. The meetings of the Sections were limited to three a month, and the decree which provided a payment of forty sous for all citizens who attended them was repealed. In the departments the officials of the Communes and of the Clubs were sifted and replaced. Everywhere the prison doors were opened and hundreds of prisoners were set free. Before the end of August, voices were raised in the Convention against the Terrorists who continued in the Government, and at the beginning of September, Billaud-Varennes, Collot d'Herbois and the remaining Terrorists retired.
As the autumn went on, the pace of the reaction increased. The Jacobins, it is true, were still numerous and active. Although the reputation of the leading Terrorists was shaken, the Mountain was still a force in the Convention. Besides the members of the old Committees, many deputies, like Romme and Soubrany, Goujon and Bourbotte, maintained without flinching extreme Jacobin views. Others, like Thuriot and Cambon, were not prepared to go too far with the reaction. The Jacobin Club, though weakened by the fall of Robespierre, had resumed its old activity, and, supported by some of its confederates in the provinces, determined not to surrender its power without a struggle. Billaud-Varennes declared passionately that the old lion was not dead. But the tide flowed heavily against the Mountain. The majority of the Convention was determined at all costs to break with the system of the Terror. The deputies of the Right and of the Centre recovered their voices under the courageous leadership of Boissy-d'Anglas and Thibeaudeau. The Thermidorians, under Tallien and Fréron, rallied to the side of the moderate members, and gathered round them many old Dantonists and many old adherents of the Mountain, Legendre, Lecointre and Bourdon de l'Oise, Merlin of Thionville and Merlin of Douai, Cambacères, and André Dumont. Sieyès, released from the necessity of silence, brought to the same side his affectation of inscrutable wisdom. Encouraged by the divisions in the Assembly, public opinion expressed itself outside. The independence of the Press revived. Fréron's paper, the Orateur du Peuple boldly took the lead of the reactionary journals. The trial of the prisoners sent up from Nantes to be tried at Paris revealed for the first time to the public the worst iniquities of Carrier's rule, and in the weeks and months which followed, evidence began to pour in against the agents of the Terror. The indignation against the Terrorists in Paris increased every day. Reactionary feeling showed itself overwhelmingly strong in the Sections, in the cafés, in the streets. Bodies of young men, some of them men of family and wealth, but most of them drawn from the ranks of tradesmen, clerks and artisans, representing the great majority of respectable people which had allowed itself to be tyrannised over so long, and which had shown its readiness to rise as early as May, 1793, gathering in the Palais Royal, once the headquarters of revolutionary agitation, organised themselves into an effective force, armed themselves with short and heavy sticks, and led by Lacretelle and encouraged by Fréron and Tallien, began to parade the streets, to suppress Jacobin speakers and meetings, to pour contempt on Jacobin opinions, and to wage war against Jacobinism in whatever shape it might be found. Extravagant and ridiculous in some respects the 'Jeunes Gens' were, and in later days it suited the Thermidorians to turn their affectation into ridicule, and to denounce them as 'Jeunesse Dorée,' as 'Elégants' and Muscadins.' But in their origin at any rate they represented a genuine popular movement, and up to April, 1795, they acted cordially with the moderate party, and rendered valuable service in destroying the terrorism which the Jacobins had established in Paris. With the new movement a new song came into fashion, and the Jeunes Gens, rejecting the Marseillaise, sang in the streets the 'Réveil du Peuple':—
'Quelle est cette lenteur barbare?
Hâte-toi, peuple souverain,
De rendre aux monstres de Ténare
Tous ces buveurs de sang humain.'
The reaction in Paris soon made itself felt in the Assembly. The attacks upon the Terrorists and their supporters redoubled. In October a law was passed forbidding the federation of popular clubs. On the 12th November, the Committee of Public Safety announced that it had closed the Jacobin Club. In the same month Carrier was arrested. He was sent for trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal and a few weeks later to the scaffold. On the 8th December, the seventy-three deputies who had been imprisoned for protesting against the expulsion of the Gironde, were readmitted to their places in the Convention. At the end of that month the Assembly decided that there was ground for investigating the charges against Billaud-Varennes, Collot d'Herbois, Vadier and Barère. As the winter went on, the members of the Right, reinforced by the seventy-three, and determined to undo the work of the Terror, demanded a reconsideration of the laws against Emigrants and priests, and the restoration in certain cases of property confiscated for political offences. In February, 1795, the Convention decreed the freedom of all forms of religious opinion; but at the same time it continued the penal enactments against non-juring priests, imposed a variety of restrictions on the exercise of public worship, and, while refusing to contribute towards the maintenance of any religion, retained its hold upon the buildings and property of the old Church. A further advance made in June towards the principles of complete toleration was afterwards repealed by the influence of the Left. On the 2nd March, Legendre carried a motion for the arrest of Billaud-Varennes, Collot d'Herbois, Vadier and Barère. On the 8th, the survivors of the Girondist leaders proscribed on the 31st May, including Isnard, Lanjuinais and Louvet, were recalled to their seats in the Assembly. The triumph of the reaction seemed to be assured.
But the Jacobins were not to fall without a struggle. They had more than once secured the victory by appealing to the physical necessities of the poor, and it was by that means that they endeavoured to conquer again. In the spring of 1795 the distress in Paris was exceptionally keen. With the political reaction an economic reaction had begun. After Thermidor it became evident that the economic system of the Terror could not stand. Its drastic laws were on all sides disregarded. No penalties or prohibitions could force men to observe laws which they were resolutely determined to infringe. The State might fix the price of food, but the producers would not produce it at that price, and when the guillotine had ceased to compel submission, the vain attempts of the State to fix prices broke down. Economic causes more powerful than any laws overthrew the Maximum, and at last, towards the end of December, the Convention recognised the fact and repealed the Maximum decrees. With the repeal of the Maximum the whole system of Terrorist finance collapsed. The practice of requisition was abandoned. The restrictions upon foreign trade and upon the exportation of specie were removed. In a short time the Bourse was reopened. The intrepid experiment by which the economists of the Terror had endeavoured to concentrate in the hands of the Government the whole commercial system of the country, fell to the ground, and the old methods of monopoly and competition, which the Terrorists had so constantly denounced, and which they had so boldly but recklessly attacked, reasserted their sway and exacted their penalty. The financial system of the Terror was ruinously mistaken, but by its draconian methods it had to some extent checked the rise in prices, and had perhaps saved from extinction the vanishing credit of the Assignats. Yet even under the Terror the Assignats had deteriorated in value. In spite of the imperious demands of the Terrorist Exchequer, in spite of its forced loans and wholesale confiscations, in spite of the plunder which it drew from its victims and of the money which, as Barère boasted, it coined on the Place de la Révolution, the Jacobin Government had never been free from financial troubles. The non-payment of taxes, the peculation of local authorities, the failure of the forced loans to bring in anything like the sum expected, the depreciation in value of national property, the ignorance of economics which prevailed among the ruling party, and above all the enormous expenses of the war, of the administration, and of supplying Paris and the great towns with food, had created a perpetual deficit. 'The Revolution and the war,' said Cambon, the chief financier of the Terror, in a report of January, 1795, 'have cost in four years five thousand three hundred and fifty millions above the ordinary expenses;' and Cambon's estimate was probably much below the fact. In vain had Cambon by a partial bankruptcy put out of circulation fifteen hundred million francs of Assignats which bore the image of the King. In vain had the Convention, in August 1794, decreed, on Cambon's proposal, the Republicanisation of the National Debt, ordered all the creditors of the State to send in their claims, entered their titles in a Great Ledger of the Public Debt, declared the capital borrowed by the State to be irrecoverable, and, regardless of all engagements entered into and of all promises of high interest previously made, informed them that in future the State would pay five per cent interest to all its creditors alike. This summary method of escaping liabilities had introduced, it is true, some order into the finances, but it had not improved the credit of the State. The chief resource of the Government had continued to be the Assignats, and not even the drastic legislation of the Terror had been able to keep their credit up.
The repeal of that drastic legislation and the financial policy of the Convention in the winter of 1794-95 accelerated their decline[13]. Prices, no longer fixed by law, rose rapidly, as the value of the paper money fell. The Government, no longer able to rely on the methods which the Terrorists had used to swell their income, and face to face with high prices and diminishing credit, could think of no better resource than to issue Assignats faster than before; and of course with every fresh issue the depreciation increased. At the end of 1794, some seven thousand million francs of Assignats were in circulation. In May, 1795, these had risen to ten thousand millions, in the August following, to sixteen thousand millions, and in the October following that, to many thousand millions more. In proportion to these enormous issues, the value of the currency declined. At the end of the reign of Terror, Assignats had been worth 33 or 34 per cent of their nominal value. In December, 1794, they had fallen to 22 per cent. In the ensuing May they stood at 7 per cent, and in the months which followed they fell to 4, to 2, and even to less than 1 per cent. In vain different members of the Convention proposed schemes for diminishing the number. The Government had no other resource to look to, and its expenses seemed daily to increase, as claims for compensation poured in upon it from those who had suffered under the Terror. With the fall of the Assignats, prices rose to an alarming height. All wage-earners who could not raise their wages in proportion to the rapid rise in prices, all who lived upon fixed incomes, all who depended on the paper-money and whose small savings consisted of Assignats, suffered acutely from the economic crisis. A certain number of people, tenant farmers for instance, who paid their rent in Assignats, and who made it many times over by the high prices fetched by corn, debtors who could pay off long-standing debts in Assignats at their nominal value, and speculators, who sprang up on all sides to traffic in the fluctuations of the currency, made heavy profits and enriched themselves. But to the great majority of people the fall of the Assignats meant grave distress. The prices of bread, of meat, of fuel, of all the necessaries of life, rose as in a siege. One reads of the most fantastic payments, of thousands of francs paid for a dinner, a cab-fare or a load of wood. The sense of the value of money vanished, when its purchasing power declined every day. But it was only those who had plenty of it who possessed the power to purchase at all.
There is overwhelming evidence of the general distress in the winter of 1794-95. From all sides complaints came in of the exorbitant dearness of food, and that trouble was aggravated by the intense cold. In Paris and many great cities the authorities bought up food at ruinous prices and distributed it in meagre rations to the poor. But as the year advanced, these rations constantly diminished. The country districts bitterly complained that they were starved in order that the big towns might be fed. 'Many families, entire communes,' wrote an official from Laon, in the summer of 1795, 'have been without bread two or three months and are living on bran or herbs.' Around Caen the peasants were living on unripe peas, beans and green barley. In Picardy 'the great majority of people' overran the woods for food. From all sides the same reports poured in upon the Government. 'Yesterday,' wrote the authorities of Montreuil-sur-Mer, 'more than two hundred of our citizens set out to beg in the country;' and those who could not get food in other ways took it by force. Nor, in spite of the efforts of the authorities, were the large towns better off. Lyons, in January, was without bread 'for five full days.' At Troyes, in March, the public distribution of bread fell to two ounces a day. At Amiens, a few months later, it ceased altogether. At Nancy a traveller noticed a crowd of 'three thousand persons imploring in vain a few pounds of flour.' In Paris the police reported case after case of misery and starvation. 'Every day,' wrote a friend to Mallet du Pan, 'I see people of the poorer class dying of starvation in the streets.... Workmen generally have to work short time, owing to the weakness and exhaustion caused by want of food.'