Robespierre.
The father of the great revolutionary demagogue was an advocate at Arras, a peaceful citizen, who had nothing about him in character or manners to suggest that he was to be the parent of the monster known to history as the tiger-man. Nay, so little of ferocity was there about the worthy advocate that, when his wife died, he nearly went melancholy-mad for grief, and in his despair left his native town, and took to wandering about France, then beyond it to Germany and England, where he finally died. There are, it is true, some ill-natured local chronicles extant which pretend that it was not so much grief as debt that drove the disconsolate widower into exile; and this harsh and unpoetic version is supported by the fact of his having, by his flight, abandoned to loneliness and utter destitution the three little children, two boys and a girl, whom the wife he so bitterly lamented had left to his paternal care. Maximilien Marie Isidore, the eldest of the three, was born on the 6th of April, 1760. The solitary position and the poverty of the deserted children attracted the compassion of some kind persons of the town, and notably that of the curé of the parish, who sent Maximilien to school, where soon, by dint of hard work and intelligence, the boy shot ahead of all his class fellows, and justified the predictions of friends that he would make a name for himself in whatever trade or calling he embraced. The Bishop of Arras, Mgr. de Conzié, was also interested in the little fellow; his industry and desolate poverty making a claim on the prelate's paternal notice. He used his influence with the abbot of the famous Abbey of Waast to grant Maximilien one of the abbatial bourses at the College of Louis le Grand, in Paris. The very first steps in life of the future persecutor of priests and religion were thus guided by the hand of the church, his poverty enriched, his orphanhood fathered, by her charity. The Abbé Proyart, then president of Louis le Grand, continued to the poor provincial student the fostering kindness of those worthy ecclesiastics who had placed him under his charge. Maximilien was also at this time largely assisted and most kindly befriended by the Abbé de la Roche, a canon of Notre Dame, who, all through the period of the young man's studies in Paris, kept watch over him, and showed him the most sincere and delicate affection. When at the age of nineteen, Maximilien left the college, the Abbé de la Roche used his influence to secure the vacant bourse for the younger brother, Augustin Robespierre, and succeeded. Maximilien was called to the bar very soon after leaving Paris, and began at once to excite attention by his talent as a speaker. The first mention we find of his forensic success is in 1783, when he was engaged in a case against the corporation of St. Omer, a small town near Arras, in behalf of a gentleman who had erected a lightning-conductor on his house, and been [pg 520] prosecuted on account of it, and condemned by the corporation. He appealed to the higher court of Arras. Robespierre pleaded his cause, and won a triumphant reversal of the first verdict. We find a note of this incident in the Memoires de Bachaumont: “The cause about the paratonnerre has been before our court three days, and has been pleaded by M. de Robespierre, a young lawyer of extraordinary merit; he has displayed in this affair—which was, in fact, the cause of art and science against prejudice—a degree of eloquence and sagacity that gives the highest idea of his talents. He had a complete triumph; on the 31st day of May the court reversed the sentence, and permitted M. de Boisvale to re-erect his paratonnerre.” Robespierre was just three-and-twenty at this date. He is styled de Robespierre by the writer, and had assumed the particule noble at a much earlier date; he is entered at college with it, and at the bar, and was elected to the States-General as de Robespierre. The pretentious prefix cost him dear, as we shall see; it afforded a poisoned shaft to Camille Desmoulins long after the Regenerator of the people had erased the feudal particle from his signature. But these were sunny days, when he might use it with impunity, and even to some advantage. The young advocate was courted and admired, and made welcome in clubs and drawing-rooms; he wrote essays and won prizes from learned societies, thus establishing a literary as well as legal reputation. He even aspired to be a poet, and addressed sonnets to ladies of fashion at Arras, which gained him the smiles of the Ariadnes and Arachnes that he sang to, and caused him to be rallied as a squire of dames. This time of merry dalliance, however, soon came to an end, and graver ambitions began to open out before Robespierre. He was elected member of the States-General. M. Dumont, the distinguished journalist, gives a lively description of the figure made by the “avocat, de Robespierre,” in one of the earliest sittings of that Assembly: “The clergy, for the purpose of surprising the Tiers Etat into a union of the orders, sent a deputation to invite the Tiers to a conference on the distresses of the poor. The Tiers saw through the design, and, not willing to acknowledge the clergy as a separate body, yet afraid to reject so charitable and popular a proposition, knew not what answer to make, when one of the deputies, after concurring in the description of the miseries of the people, rose and addressed the ecclesiastical deputation: ‘Go tell your colleagues that, if they are so anxious to relieve the people, they should hasten to unite themselves in this hall with the friends of the people. Tell them no longer to retard our proceedings and the public good by contumacious delays, or to try to carry their point by such stratagems as this. Rather let them, as ministers of religion, as worthy servants of their Master, renounce the splendor which surrounds them, the luxury which insults the poor. Dismiss those insolent lackeys who attend you; sell your gaudy equipages, and convert those odious superfluities into food for the poor.’ At this speech, which interpreted so well the passions of the moment, there arose, not applause—that would have appeared like a bravado—but a confused murmur of approbation much more flattering. Every one asked who was the speaker. He [pg 521] was not known, but in a few minutes his name passed from mouth to mouth; it was one which afterwards made all France tremble—it was Robespierre!”
One is at a loss which to admire most in this brilliant sortie, the skill and power of the speaker in playing on the passions of his hearers, or the dastardly ingratitude which led him to use the eloquence he owed in so large a measure to the clergy for the purpose of stigmatizing his best benefactors. The first time Robespierre's voice was raised in the tribune it was to vituperate the men to whom he owed his education, almost, it may be said, his existence. The reward of this treachery was not delayed; he electrified his audience, and henceforth became known to fame, though not yet to infamy. It is only just to Robespierre to admit that when he entered on his public life, his character was unstained by any of the vices which it developed later; he was in private life held to be virtuous, and suspected of no vice beyond the honorable one of ambition. Probably he would have lived and died amongst his fellow-citizens without earning a worse reputation than the rest of them, if this latent ambition had not led him to seek to rise above them, and if his ability had not seconded the aspiration. Even in his demagogic career he kept his reputation for integrity, and gained the surname of the Incorruptible. Incorruptible by money he certainly was, while the instinct of either cowardice or sagacity induced him to disavow all personal ambition. Power was what he thirsted for; wealth and pageant he despised. These principles, aided by his fiery talent as any orator and his shrewd knowledge of the times, soon lifted him above all competitors, and made him a kind of uncrowned monarch long before he became so in reality as dictator of the republic. It is interesting to note the various decrees he passed while reigning in the National Assembly. One of the first was the turning of the Church of S. Geneviève into a Pantheon for the ashes of great men, and the inauguration of the paganized Christian temple by the entombing of Mirabeau's remains there. Then we see him ardent in endeavoring to carry the abolition of capital punishment—an instance of that strange paradox so common to Frenchmen, who shrink with morbid sentimentality from inflicting death on the vilest malefactor by the hand of justice, while so ready to shed the blood of innocent men without remorse, nay, with exultation, the moment their passions are roused.
The flight of the royal family to Varennes wrought a sudden and decisive change in the state of public affairs. Robespierre was just then at the summit of his reputation as an orator, admired as the most prominent figure in Mme. Roland's coterie, which numbered all the cleverest men of the new school, though the gifted and ill-starred centre of the group seems, even in the days of their closest friendship, to have resented Robespierre's stubborn independence, which contrasted disagreeably with the unqualified adulation of his fellow-devotees.
The abortive attempt of the unfortunate Louis to fly from a position which had become unbearable had set the match to the train which Robespierre and his Jacobin faction had so long been preparing. The question, hitherto whispered in ambiguous words, was now spoken boldly aloud: What was to be done with the king? Lafayette was [pg 522] for keeping him a prisoner in the Tuileries, he, meanwhile, acting as a sort of military viceroy; the Orleanist faction had another solution to offer; the Jacobins and the Girondists another. There was a stormy sitting at the Assembly. Brissot proposed that the people should like one man rally round the republican flag, and sign a petition for the abolition of the king. There arose in answer to this daring proposition a tempest of applause, terror, anger, and loyal indignation. The Assembly rejected it, and voted for maintaining the king. Robespierre rushed out of the hall, tearing his hair and crying out, “My friends, we are lost! The king is saved!” This was on the 15th of July. A meeting had been already called of the Jacobin Club for the 17th on the Champs de Mars for the purpose of expressing the national will. The club, on hearing the vote of the Assembly, kept up a farce of respect by issuing a counter-order. But the sovereign people were hampered by no such mock scruples; they, in the person of Brissot, drew up a fresh petition, and invited all classes of their fellow-citizens to attend at the appointed day on the Champs de Mars, where the altar of fatherland would be erected, and where all patriots could sign the petition towards the freedom of the country. A tragi-comic incident marked the proceedings at an early hour. Two men were found hid under the “altar,” and detected in the act of boring a hole in it with a gimlet; they were forthwith dragged out and massacred on the spot, though the only evidence of guilt brought against them at the time, or afterwards, was that one of them had a wooden leg, and the other a basket of provisions. The mob were like dry powder that only wanted a spark to make it ignite, destroying and self-destructive. The wildest inferences were drawn from the discovery of the two unlucky eaves-droppers: they were laying a mine to blow up the patriots assembled round the altar of fatherland; the absence of all appliances for this terrible purpose proved nothing; some cried out that they were spies in the king's pay; others that they were secreted there as dupes to be murdered by Lafayette's creatures as a pretext for beginning the massacres that followed. We even find Mme. Roland repeating some absurd notions of this kind; but nothing is too monstrous or too preposterous for prejudice to swallow. However, let the motives of the two men have been what they may, their murder was undoubtedly the signal for that onslaught of the troops which completely destroyed Lafayette's tottering popularity, and compelled him to leave Paris for a command on the frontier. The real odium of the unpremeditated blood-shedding fell, like every mistake of the time, on the king. On the 5th of February, 1792, Robespierre was named Public Accuser, and from this event dates the explosion of personal rivalry between him and Brissot. He never could forgive the latter having been chosen to draw up that famous petition of the Champs de Mars, and for keeping the ascendency which this fact gave him in the Assembly and in the Jacobin Club. But Robespierre did not long retain the subordinate position of Public Accuser; he hated the bondage of having to attend at fixed hours, and some months after his nomination he resigned and started a newspaper called the Défenseur. Blood and terror were henceforth [pg 523] the watchwords of the journalist-patriot. He effected a sham reconciliation with Brissot and all other enemies, and the Judas kiss of hate and treachery went round.
Roland was named minister at this crisis; a clever and honest man, moderate, and, above all, the husband of Mme. Roland, his nomination was hailed with joy by all. Robespierre alone was furious at seeing the mediocre provincial farmer placed over his head. His jealous vengeance against Mme. Roland dated from this elevation of her husband. The success of his journal consoled him, meanwhile, for the delay of larger triumphs, while it procured him competence and independence, which were all he required. He lodged with a man named Duplay, a carpenter, who had a wife and two daughters. One of the latter became branded in connection with the name of her father's tenant. Robespierre vindicated his surname of Incorruptible all through the period of his popular power, inasmuch as he was inaccessible to the temptation of money or any of the softer bribes which sometimes beguile hard, ambitious men into acts of mercy or passing tenderness.
In August, 1792, he suspended his labors as a journalist, and henceforth devoted his undivided energies and his whole time to the political events which were thickening around him. The last number of the Défenseur contains an inflammatory appeal which is too significant of the man and the times to be omitted. It was decided that a convention should be elected to choose a new form of national government. The issue depended almost entirely on the character and principles of the members who should compose it. Robespierre determined at any and every cost to be one of the elected. It was his supreme opportunity; if he missed it, his career as a popular leader was broken, and he must sink back into the ranks of obscure mediocrities who had shot up from the mass of agitators like rockets, burning bright and fierce for a moment, and then subsiding in darkness. He had that instinct of genius which enables a man to read the temper of his time, and to this sanguinary temper he passionately addressed himself in the closing number of his paper:
“You must prepare the success of this convention by the regeneration of the spirit of the people. Let us awake—all, all arise, all arm, and the enemies of liberty will hide themselves in darkness. Let the tocsin of Paris be re-echoed in all the departments. Let the people learn at once to reason and to fight. You are now at war with all your oppressors, and you will have no peace till you have punished them. Far be from you that pusillanimous weakness or that cowardly indulgence which the tyrants so long satiated with the blood of the people now invoke when their own hour is come! Impunity has produced all their crimes and all your sufferings. Let them fall under the sword of the law. Clemency towards them would be real barbarity—an outrage on injured humanity.” This manifesto revealed the true aim and policy of Robespierre, and just gave the touch that was necessary to set the wheel revolving. Danton cried amen to it, and all the faction shouted amen in chorus. “We must dare, and dare again, and dare to the bitter end!” said Danton, and the word acted like a trumpet-call to the bloodhounds of the revolution. The prisons of [pg 524] Paris were at this moment gorged with aristocrats awaiting their trial. The people shouted, Try them! The tocsin sounded, the prison-doors were surrounded. Mock courts of justice were set up in the courtyards. Quickly, one by one, the prisoners are called out, questions are rapidly put and answered; the jury decides: “Let the prisoner be enlarged!” The gendarmes seize him; they open the gate and “enlarge” him. He falls forward on a mass of glittering pikes and bayonets, and dies, cut to pieces. Soon the number of the butchered is so great that the amateur executioners have to pause and clear the space by piling up the corpses to one side before they resume their work. Every prison presents the same scene. At La Force a remnant of the Swiss Guard is called out. “They clasp each other spasmodically, gray veterans crying, ‘Mercy, gentlemen, mercy!’ But there is no mercy! They prepare to die like brave men. One of them steps forward. He had on a blue frock-coat. He was about thirty. His stature was above the common, his look noble and martial. ‘I go first,’ he said, ‘since it must be so. Adieu!’ Then, dashing his hat behind him, ‘Which way?’ cried he to the brigands. ‘Show it me.’ They open the folding gate. He is announced to the multitude. He stands a moment motionless, then plunges forth among the pikes, and dies of a thousand wounds.”[117] The fair and saintly Princesse de Lamballe fell, butchered by the same pikes; her head paraded through the streets, her remains profaned by the most unheard-of indignities. As it always happens in these storms of human souls, there were tones of a divine harmony to be heard striking through the hideous din. Old M. de Sombreuil is dragged out to die. His daughter, a tender girl in the first blush of maidenhood, rushes out, fearless and bold, clinging to him, and appeals to the tigers about to shed his blood: “O good friends! he is my father! He is no aristocrat! We hate aristocrats; tell me how I can prove it to you?” They fill a bowl full of the hot blood of an aristocrat just slain, and present it to her, saying: “Drink this, and we will believe thee and spare thy father.”
She drinks the loathsome draught, and clasps her father amidst the Vivats of the mob. Alas! it was only a respite that the brave deed had gained for the beloved old man. He died by those same blood-stained hands before the year was out. At the abbey a picture of rest and calm is to be seen: “Towards seven on Sunday night, we saw two men enter, their hands bloody, and armed with sabres. A turnkey with a torch lighted them; he points to the bed of the unfortunate Swiss, Reding. Reding was dying. One of the men paused; but the other said: Allons donc! (come along!) and lifted the dying man, and carried him on his back out to the street. He was massacred there. We looked at one another in silence; we clasped each other's hands; we gazed on the pavement of our prison, on which lay the moonlight, checkered with shadows.... At three in the morning we heard them breaking in one of the prison-doors. We thought they were coming to kill us.... The Abbé Lenfant and the Abbé de Chapt-Rastignac appeared in the pulpit of the chapel, which was our prison. They had got in by a [pg 525] door from the stairs. They said to us that our end was at hand; that we must compose ourselves and receive their last blessing. An electric movement, not to be described, threw us all on our knees, and we received it. These two white-haired old men blessing us from their place above, death hovering over our heads—the moment is never to be forgotten.”[118] Half an hour later the two priests were dragged out and massacred, those whom they had strengthened with their last words to meet a like fate listening to their cries.
The massacres began on the 2d and lasted till the 6th, when Robespierre and Danton were elected to that legislative body called the Deputation of Paris, composed of twenty-four members, the first name on the list being Robespierre, the last Philippe Egalité. It was on this occasion that the future regicide adopted the surname of Egalité, he being compelled to choose some appellation not obnoxious to the people.