A colossus with the head of a “Tartar,” pitted with the small-pox, tragically and terribly ugly, with a mask convulsed like that of a growling “bull-dog,” with small, cavernous, restless eyes buried under the huge wrinkles of a threatening brow, with a thundering voice, and moving and acting like a combatant, full-blooded, boiling over with passion and energy, his strength in its outbursts seeming illimitable, like the forces of Nature, roaring like a bull when speaking, and heard through closed windows fifty yards off in the street, employing immoderate imagery, intensely in earnest, trembling with indignation, revenge, and patriotic sentiments, able to arouse savage instincts in the most tranquil breast and generous instincts in the most brutal, profane, using emphatic terms, cynical, not monotonously so, and affectedly like Hébert, but spontaneously and to the point, full of crude jests worthy of Rabelais, possessing a stock of jovial sensuality and good-humor, cordial and familiar in his ways, frank, friendly in tone; in short, outwardly and inwardly the best-fitted for winning the confidence and sympathy of a Gallic-Parisian populace, and all contributing to the formation of “his inborn, practical popularity,” and to make of him “a grand seignior of sans-culotterie.”
Thus endowed for playing a part, there is a strong temptation to act it the moment the theatre is ready, whether this be a mean one, got up for the occasion, and the actors rogues, scamps, and prostitutes, or the part an ignoble one, murderous, and finally fatal to him who undertakes it. He comprehended from the first the ultimate object and definite result of the revolution, that is to say, the dictatorship of the violent minority. Immediately after the “14th of July,” 1789, he organized in his quarter of the city a small independent republic, aggressive and predominant, the center of the faction, a refuge for the riff-raff and a rendezvous for fanatics, a pandemonium composed of every available madcap, every rogue, visionary, shoulder-hitter, newspaper scribbler, and stump-speaker, either a secret or avowed plotter of murder, Camille Desmoulins, Fréron, Hébert, Chaumette, Clootz, Théroigne, Marat—while, in this more than Jacobin state, the model in anticipation of that he is to establish later, he reigns, as he will afterward reign, the permanent president of the district, commander of the battalion, orator of the club, and the concocter of bold undertakings. In order to set the machine up, he cleared the ground, fused the metal, hammered out the principal pieces, filed off the blisterings, designed the action, adjusted the minor wheels, set it a-going and indicated what it had to do, and, at the same time, he forged the plating which guarded it from the foreigner and against all outward violence. The machine being his, why, after constructing it, did he not serve as its engineer?
Because, if competent to construct it, he was not qualified to manage it. In a crisis he may take hold of the wheel himself, excite an assembly or a mob in his favor, carry things with a high hand, and direct an executive committee for a few weeks. But he dislikes regular, persistent labor; he is not made for studying documents, for poring over papers, and confining himself to administrative routine. Never, like Robespierre and Billaud, can he attend to both official and police duties at the same time, carefully reading minute daily reports, annotating mortuary lists, extemporizing ornate abstractions, coolly enunciating falsehoods, and acting out the patient, satisfied inquisitor; and, especially, he can never become the systematic executioner.
On the one hand, his eyes are not obscured by the gray veil of theory; he does not regard men through the “Contrat-Social” as a sum of arithmetical units, but as they really are, living, suffering, shedding their blood, especially those he knows, each with his peculiar physiognomy and demeanor. Compassion is excited by all this when one has any feeling, and he had. Danton had a heart; he had the quick sensibilities of a man of flesh and blood stirred by the primitive instincts, the good ones along with the bad ones, instincts which culture had neither impaired nor deadened, which allowed him to plan and permit the September massacre, but which did not allow him to practice, daily and blindly, systematic and wholesale murder. Already in September, “cloaking his pity under his bellowing,” he had shielded or saved many eminent men from the butchers. When the ax is about to fall on the Girondists, he is “ill with grief” and despair. “I am unable to save them,” he exclaimed, “and big tears streamed down his cheeks.”
On the other hand, his eyes are not covered by the bandage of incapacity or lack of forethought. He detected the innate vice of the system, the inevitable and approaching suicide of the revolution. “The Girondists forced us to throw ourselves upon the sans-culotterie which has devoured them, which will devour us, and which will eat itself up.” “Let Robespierre and Saint-Just alone, and there will soon be nothing left in France but a Thebaid of political Trappists.” At the end he sees more clearly still. “On a day like this I organized the revolutionary tribunal.... I ask pardon for it of God and man.... In revolutions, authority remains with the greatest scoundrels.... It is better to be a poor fisherman than govern men.”
Nevertheless, he professed to govern them; he constructed a new machine for the purpose, and, deaf to its creaking, it worked in conformity with its structure and the impulse he gave to it. It towers before him, this sinister machine, with its vast wheel and iron cogs grinding all France, their multiplied teeth pressing out each individual life, its steel blade constantly rising and falling, and, as it plays faster and faster, daily exacting a larger and larger supply of human material, while those who furnish this supply are held to be as insensible and as senseless as itself. Danton can not, or will not, be so. He gets out of the way, diverts himself, gambles, forgets; he supposes that the titular decapitators will probably consent to take no notice of him; in any case, they do not pursue him; “they would not dare do it.... No one must lay hands on me; I am the ark.” At the worst he prefers “to be guillotined rather than guillotine.” Having said or thought this, he is ripe for the scaffold.
ROBESPIERRE.
By HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE.
[Maximilian Marie Isadore de Robespierre, the most powerful figure among the French revolutionists, born 1758, guillotined 1794. By profession an attorney, he was elected to the Constituent Assembly, the States General, in 1789, from Arras. Profoundly imbued with the theories of Rousseau, he was from the beginning a fierce assailant of the monarchy, and after Mirabeau’s death rapidly acquired a commanding position in public affairs. In the National Convention, which succeeded the dissolution of the States General and the abdication and imprisonment of Louis XVI, Robespierre was a prominent leader, and identified himself with the extreme party, the Jacobins, called the “Mountain,” from the elevated seats on which they sat. During this earlier part of his political career he affected opposition to capital punishment, and remonstrated with Danton against the September massacres. He led the Jacobins, however, in demanding the trial and death of the king, and proposed the decree organizing the Committee of Public Safety, which was clothed with omnipotent sway. When he became a member of this terrible body he speedily instituted what is known as “the Reign of Terror,” beginning with the destruction of the Girondists, against whom he formulated the deadly epigram: “There are periods in revolutions when to live is a crime.” Danton was sacrificed to his envy and fears as a dangerous rival. Robespierre’s overthrow, after about a year of practical dictatorship, was owing to two causes, which inspired the wavering courage of his opponents in the convention. The mistress of Tallien, a prominent revolutionist, lay in prison expecting a daily call to the guillotine. Carnot (the grandfather of the present chief of the French republic) attended a dinner-party at which Robespierre was present. The heat of the day had caused the guests to throw off their coats, and Carnot in looking for a paper took Robespierre’s coat by mistake, in the pocket of which he saw the memorandum containing the names of those prescribed for the guillotine, among them his own and those of other guests. On the 9th Thermidor, July 27, 1794, occurred the outbreak in the convention which broke Roberspierre’s power, and on the following day sent him to the guillotine, thus ending the Reign of Terror.]
Marat and Danton finally become effaced, or efface themselves, and the stage is left to Robespierre who absorbs attention. If we would comprehend him we must look at him as he stands in the midst of his surroundings. At the last stage of an intellectual vegetation passing away, he remains on the last branch of the eighteenth century, the most abortive and driest offshoot of the classical spirit. He has retained nothing of a worn-out system of philosophy but its lifeless dregs and well-conned formulæ, the formulæ of Rousseau, Mably, and Raynal, concerning “the people, nature, reason, liberty, tyrants, factions, virtue, morality,” a ready-made vocabulary, expressions too ample, the meaning of which, ill-defined by the masters, evaporates in the hands of the disciple. He never tries to get at this; his writings and speeches are merely long strings of vague abstract periods; there is no telling fact in them, no distinct, characteristic detail, no appeal to the eye evoking a living image, no personal, special observation, no clear, frank, original impression.
It might be said of him that he never saw anything with his own eyes, that he neither could nor would see, that false conceptions have intervened and fixed themselves between him and the object; he combines these in logical sequence, and simulates the absent thought by an affected jargon, and this is all. The other Jacobins alongside of him likewise use the same scholastic jargon; but none of them expatiate on it so lengthily. For hours, we grope after him in the vague shadows of political speculation, in the cold and perplexing mist of didactic generalities, trying in vain to make something out of his colorless tirades, and we grasp nothing. We then, astonished, ask what all this talk amounts to, and why he talks at all; the answer is, that he has said nothing and that he talks only for the sake of talking, the same as a sectary preaching to his congregation, neither the preacher nor his audience ever wearying, the one of turning the dogmatic crank, and the other of listening. So much the better if the hopper is empty; the emptier it is the easier and faster the crank turns. And better still, if the empty term he selects is used in a contrary sense; the sonorous words justice, humanity, mean to him piles of human heads, the same as a text from the gospels means to a grand inquisitor the burning of heretics.