THE ORIGINS OF CONTEMPORARY FRANCE, VOLUME 4
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, VOLUME 3.
by Hippolyte A. Taine
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Annotations by the transcriber are initialled SR.
Svend Rom, April 2000.
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Please note that all references to earlier Volumes of the
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CONTENTS
[ PREFACE. ]
[ BOOK FIRST. THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE REVOLUTIONARY GOVERNMENT. ]
[ CHAPTER I. JACOBIN GOVERNMENT ][ I. The despotic creed and instincts of the Jacobin. ]
[ BOOK SECOND. THE JACOBIN PROGRAM. ]
[ II. Jacobin Dissimulation. ]
[ III. Primary Assemblies ]
[ IV. The Delegates reach Paris ]
[ V. Fête of August 10th ]
[ VI. The Mountain. ]
[ VII. Extent and Manifesto of the departmental insurrection ]
[ VIII. The Reasons for the Terror. ]
[ IX. Destruction of Rebel Cities ]
[ X. Destruction of the Girondin party ]
[ XI. Institutions of the Revolutionary Government ]
[ CHAPTER I. THE JACOBIN PARTY ][ I. The Doctrine. ]
[ CHAPTER II. REACTIONARY CONCEPT OF THE STATE. ]
[ II. A Communist State. ]
[ III. The object of the State is the regeneration of man. ]
[ IV. Two distortions of the natural man. ]
[ V. Equality and Inequality. ]
[ VI. Conditions requisite for making a citizen. ]
[ VII. Socialist projects. ]
[ VIII. Indoctrination of mind and intellect. ][ I. Reactionary concept of the State. ]
[ BOOK THIRD. THE MEN IN POWER. ]
[ II. Changed minds. ]
[ III. Origin and nature of the modern State. ]
[ IV. The state is tempted to encroach. ]
[ V. Direct common interest. ]
[ VI. Indirect common interest. ]
[ VII. Fabrication of social instruments. ]
[ VIII. Comparison between despotisms. ]
[ CHAPTER I. PSYCHOLOGY OF THE JACOBIN LEADERS. ][ I. Marat. ]
[ CHAPTER II. THE RULERS OF THE COUNTRY. ]
[ II. Danton. ]
[ III. Robespierre. ][ I. The Convention. ]
[ CHAPTER III. THE RULERS. (continued). ]
[ II. Its participation in crime. ]
[ III. The Committee of Public Safety. ]
[ IV. The Statesmen. ]
[ V. Official Jacobin organs. ]
[ VI. Commissars of the Revolution. ]
[ VII. Brutal Instincts. ]
[ IX. Vice. ][ I. The Central Government Administration. ]
[ BOOK FOURTH. THE GOVERNED. ]
[ II. Subaltern Jacobins. ]
[ III. A Revolutionary Committee. ]
[ IV. Provincial Administration. ]
[ V. Jacobins sent to the Provinces. ]
[ VI. Quality of staff thus formed. ]
[ VII. The Armed Forces. ]
[ CHAPTER I. THE OPPRESSED. ][ I. Revolutionary Destruction. ]
[ CHAPTER II. FOOD AND PROVISIONS. ]
[ II. The Value of Notables in Society. ]
[ III. The three classes of Notables. ]
[ IV. The Clergy. ]
[ V. The Bourgeoisie. ]
[ VI. The Demi-notables. ]
[ VII. Principle of socialist Equality. ]
[ VIII. Rigor against the Upper Classes. ]
[ IX. The Jacobin Citizen Robot. ]
[ X. The Governors and the Governed. ][ I. Economical Complexity of Food Chain. ]
[ BOOK FIFTH. THE END OF THE REVOLUTIONARY GOVERNMENT. ]
[ II. Conditions in 1793. A Lesson in Market Economics. ]
[ III. Privation. ]
[ IV. Hunger. ]
[ V. Revolutionary Remedies. ]
[ VI. Relaxation. ]
[ VII. Misery at Paris. ]
[ CHAPTER I. THE CONVENTION. ][ I. The Convention. ]
[ II. Re-election of the Two-thirds. ]
[ III. A Directory of Regicides. ]
[ IV. Public Opinon. ]
[ VI. The Directory. ]
[ VII. Enforcement of Pure Jacobinism. ]
[ VIII. Propaganda and Foreign Conquests. ]
[ IX. National Disgust. ]
[ X. Contrast between Civil and Military France. ]
PREFACE.
"In Egypt," says Clement of Alexandria,[1101] "the sanctuaries of the temples are shaded by curtains of golden tissue. But on going further into the interior in quest of the statue, a priest of grave aspect, advancing to meet you and chanting a hymn in the Egyptian tongue, slightly raises a veil to show you the god. And what do you behold? A crocodile, or some indigenous serpent, or other dangerous animal, the Egyptian god being a beast sprawling on a purple carpet."
We need not visit Egypt or go so far back in history to encounter crocodile worship, as this can be readily found in France at the end of the last century.—Unfortunately, a hundred years is too long an interval, too far away, for an imaginative retrospect of the past. At the present time, standing where we do and regarding the horizon behind us, we see only forms which the intervening atmosphere embellishes, shimmering contours which each spectator may interpret in his own fashion; no distinct, animated figure, but merely a mass of moving points, forming and dissolving in the midst of picturesque architecture. I was anxious to take a closer view of these vague points, and, accordingly, deported myself back to the last half of the eighteenth century. I have now been living with them for twelve years, and, like Clement of Alexandria, examined, first, the temple, and next the god. A passing glance at these is not sufficient; it was also necessary to understand the theology on which this cult is founded. This one, explained by a very specious theology, like most others, is composed of dogmas called the principles of 1789; they were proclaimed, indeed, at that date, having been previously formulated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
* The well known sovereignty of the people.
* The rights of Man.
* The social contract.
Once adopted, their practical results unfolded themselves naturally. In three years these dogmas installed the crocodile on the purple carpet insides the sanctuary behind the golden veil. He was selected for the place on account of the energy of his jaws and the capacity of his stomach; he became a god through his qualities as a destructive brute and man-eater.—Comprehending this, the rites which consecrate him and the pomp which surrounds him need not give us any further concern.—We can observe him, like any ordinary animal, and study his various attitudes, as he lies in wait for his prey, springs upon it, tears it to pieces, swallows it, and digests it. I have studied the details of his structure, the play of his organs, his habits, his mode of living, his instincts, his faculties, and his appetites.—Specimens abounded. I have handled thousands of them, and have dissected hundreds of every species and variety, always preserving the most valuable and characteristic examples, but for lack of room I have been compelled to let many of them go because my collections was too large. Those that I was able to bring back with me will be found here, and, among others, about twenty individuals of different dimensions, which—a difficult undertaking—I have kept alive with great pains. At all events, they are intact and perfect, and particularly the three largest. These seem to me, of their kind, truly remarkable, and those in which the divinity of the day might well incarnate himself.—Authentic and rather well kept cookbooks inform us about the cost of the cult: We can more or less estimate how much the sacred crocodiles consumed in ten years; we know their bills of daily fare, their favorite morsels. Naturally, the god selected the fattest victims, but his voracity was so great that he likewise bolted down, and blindly, the lean ones, and in much greater number than the fattest. Moreover, by virtue of his instincts, and an unfailing effect of the situation, he ate his equals once or twice a year, except when they succeeded in eating him.—This cult certainly is instructive, at least to historians and men of pure science. If any believers in it still remain I do not aim to convert them; one cannot argue with a devotee on matters of faith. This volume, accordingly, like the others that have gone before it, is written solely for amateurs of moral zoology, for naturalists of the understanding, for seekers of truth, of texts, and of proofs—for these alone and not for the public, whose mind is made up and which has its own opinion on the Revolution. This opinion began to be formed between 1825 and 1830, after the retirement or withdrawal of eye witnesses. When they disappeared it was easy to convince a credulous public that crocodiles were philanthropists; that many possessed genius; that they scarcely ate others than the guilty, and that if they sometimes ate too many it was unconsciously and in spite of themselves, or through devotion and self-sacrifice for the common good.
H. A. Taine, Menthon Saint Bernard, July 1884.
BOOK FIRST. THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE REVOLUTIONARY GOVERNMENT.
CHAPTER I. JACOBIN GOVERNMENT
I. The despotic creed and instincts of the Jacobin.
Weakness of former governments.—Energy of the new
government.—The despotic creed and instincts of the
Jacobin.
So far, the weakness of the legal government is extreme. During four years, whatever its kind, it has constantly and everywhere been disobeyed. For four years it never dared enforce obedience. Recruited among the cultivated and refined class, the rulers of the country have brought with them into power the prejudices and sensibilities of the epoch. Under the influence of the prevailing dogma they have submitted to the will of the multitude and, with too much faith in the rights of Man, they have had too little in the authority of the magistrate. Moreover, through humanity, they have abhorred bloodshed and, unwilling to repress, they have allowed themselves to be repressed. Thus from the 1st of May, 1789, to June 2, 1793, they have administrated or legislated, escaping countless insurrections, almost all of them going unpunished; while their constitution, an unhealthy product of theory and fear, have done no more than transform spontaneous anarchy into legal anarchy. Deliberately and through distrust of authority they have undermined the principle of command, reduced the King to the post of a decorative puppet, and almost annihilated the central power: from the top to the bottom of the hierarchy the superior has lost his hold on the inferior, the minister on the departments, the departments on the districts, and the districts on the communes. Throughout all branches of the service, the chief, elected on the spot and by his subordinates, has come to depend on them. Thenceforth, each post in which authority is vested is found isolated, dismantled and preyed upon, while, to crown all, the Declaration of Rights, proclaiming "the jurisdiction of constituents over their clerks,"[1102] has invited the assailants to make the assault. On the strength of this a faction arises which ends in becoming an organized band; under its clamor, its menaces and its pikes, at Paris and in the provinces, at the polls and in the parliament, the majorities are all silenced, while the minorities vote, decree and govern; the Legislative Assembly is purged, the King is dethroned, and the Convention is mutilated. Of all the garrisons of the central citadel, whether royalists, Constitutionalists, or Girondins, not one has been able to defend itself, to re-fashion the executive instrument, to draw the sword and use it in the streets: on the first attack, often at the first summons, all have surrendered, and now the citadel, with every other public fortress, is in the hands of the Jacobins.
This time, its occupants are of a different stamp. Aside from the great mass of well-disposed people fond of a quiet life, the Revolution has sifted out and separated from the rest all who are fanatical, brutal or perverse enough to have lost respect for others; these form the new garrison—sectarians blinded by their creed, the roughs (assommeurs) who are hardened by their calling, and those who make all they can out of their offices. None of this class are scrupulous concerning human life or property; for, as we have seen, they have shaped the theory to suit themselves, and reduced popular sovereignty to their sovereignty. The commonwealth, according to the Jacobin, is his; with him, the commonwealth comprises all private possessions, bodies, estates, souls and consciences; everything belongs to him; the fact of being a Jacobin makes him legitimately czar and pope. Little does he care about the wills of actually living Frenchmen; his mandate does not emanate from a vote; it descends to him from aloft, conferred on him by Truth, by Reason, by Virtue. As he alone is enlightened, and the only patriot, he alone is worthy to take command, while resistance, according to his imperious pride, is criminal. If the majority protests it is because the majority is imbecile or corrupt; in either case, it deserves to be brought to heel. And, in fact, the Jacobin only does that and right away too; insurrections, usurpations, pillaging, murders, assaults on individuals, on judges and public attorneys, on assemblies, violations of law, attacks on the State, on communities—there is no outrage not committed by him. He has always acted as sovereign instinctively; he was so as a private individual and clubbist; he is not to cease being so, now that he possesses legal authority, and all the more because if he hesitates he knows he is lost; to save himself from the scaffold he has no refuge but in a dictatorship. Such a man, unlike his predecessors, will not allow himself to be turned out; on the contrary, he will exact obedience at any cost. He will not hesitate to restore the central power; he will put back the local wheels that have been detached; he will repair the old forcing gear; he will set it agoing so as to work more rudely and arbitrarily than ever, with greater contempt for private rights and public liberties than either a Louis XIV. or a Napoleon.
II. Jacobin Dissimulation.
Contrast between his words and his acts.—How he
dissimulates his change of front.—The Constitution of June,
1793.—Its promises of freedom.
In the mean time, he has to harmonize his coming acts with his recent declarations, which, at the first glance, seems a difficult operation: for, in the speeches he has made he has already condemned the actions he meditates. Yesterday he exaggerated the rights of the governed, even to a suppression of those of the government; to-morrow he is to exaggerate the rights of the people in power, even to suppressing those who are governed. The people, as he puts it, is the sole sovereign, and he is going to treat the people as slaves; the government, as he puts it, is a valet, and he is going to endow the government with prerogatives of a sultan. He has just denounced the slightest exercise of public authority as a crime; he is now going to punish as a crime the slightest resistance to public authority. What will justify such a volte-face and with what excuse can he repudiate the principles with which he justified his takeover?—He takes good care not to repudiate them; it would drive the already rebellious provinces to extremes; on the contrary, he proclaims them with renewed vigor, through which move the ignorant crowd, seeing the same flask always presented to it, imagines that it is always served with the same liquor, and is thus forced to drink tyranny under the label of freedom. Whatever the charlatan can do with his labels, signboards, shouting and lies for the next six months, will be done to disguise the new nostrum; so much the worse for the public if, later on, it discovers that the draught is bitter; sooner or later it must swallow it, willingly or by compulsion: for, in the interval, the instruments are being got ready to force it down the public throat.[1103]
As a beginning, the Constitution, so long anticipated and so often promised, is hastily fabricated:[1104] declarations of rights in thirty-five articles, the Constitutional bill in one hundred and twenty-four articles, political principles and institutions of every sort, electoral, legislative, executive, administrative, judicial, financial and military;[1105] in three weeks all is drawn up and passed on the double.—Of course, the new Constitutionalists do not propose to produce an effective and serviceable instrument; that is the least of their worries. Hérault Séchelles, the reporter of the bill, writes on the 7th of June, "to have procured for him at once the laws of Minos, of which he has urgent need;" very urgent need, as he must hand in the Constitution that week.[1106] Such circumstance is sufficiently characteristic of both the workmen and the work. All is mere show and pretense. Some of the workmen are shrewd politicians whose sole object is to furnish the public with words instead of realities; others, ordinary scribblers of abstractions, or even ignoramuses, and unable to distinguish words from reality, imagine that they are framing laws by stringing together a lot of phrases.—It is not a difficult job; the phrases are ready-made to hand. "Let the plotters of anti-popular systems," says the reporter, "painfully elaborate their projects! Frenchmen.... have only to consult their hearts to read the Republic there!"[1107] Drafted in accordance with the "Contrat-Social," filled with Greek and Latin reminiscences, it is a summary "in pithy style" of the manual of current aphorisms then in vogue, Rousseau's mathematical formulas and prescriptions, "the axioms of truth and the consequences flowing from these axioms," in short, a rectilinear constitution which any school-boy may spout on leaving college. Like a handbill posted on the door of a new shop, it promises to customers every imaginable article that is handsome and desirable. Would you have rights and liberties? You will find them all here. Never has the statement been so clearly made, that the government is the servant, creature and tool of the governed; it is instituted solely "to guarantee to them their natural, imprescriptible rights." [1108] Never has a mandate been more strictly limited: "The right of expressing one's thoughts and opinions, either through the press or in any other way; the right of peaceful assembly, the free exercise of worship, cannot be interdicted." Never have citizens been more carefully guarded against the encroachments and excesses of public authority: "The law should protect public and private liberties against the oppression of those who govern... offenses committed by the people's mandatories and agents must never go unpunished. Let free men instantly put to death every individual usurping sovereignty. .. Every act against a man outside of the cases and forms which the law determines is arbitrary and tyrannical; whosoever is subjected to violence in the execution of this act has the right to repel it by force... 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."
To civil rights the generous legislator has added political rights, and multiplied every precaution for maintaining the dependence of rulers on the people.—In the first place, rulers are appointed by the people and through direct choice or nearly direct choice: in primary meetings the people elect deputies, city officers, justices of the peace, and electors of the second degree; the latter, in their turn, elect in the secondary meetings, district and department administrators, civil arbitrators, criminal judges, judges of appeal and the eighty candidates from amongst which the legislative body is to select its executive council.—In the second place, all powers of whatever kind are never conferred except for a very limited term: one year for deputies, for electors of the second degree, for civil arbitrators, and for judges of every kind and class. As to municipalities and also department and district administrations, these are one-half renewable annually. Every first of May the fountain-head of authority flows afresh, the people in its primary assemblies, spontaneously formed, manifesting or changing at will its staff of clerks.—In the third place, even when installed and at work, the people may, if it pleases, become their collaborator: means are provided for "deliberating" with its deputies. The latter, on incidental questions, those of slight importance, on the ordinary business of the year, may enact laws; but on matters of general, considerable and permanent interest, they are simply to propose the laws, while, especially as regards a declaration of war, the people alone must decide. The people have a suspensive veto and, finally, a definitive veto, which they may exercise when they please. To this end, they may assemble in extraordinary session; one-fifth of the citizens who have the right to vote suffice for their convocation. Once convoked, the vote is determined by a Yes or a No on the act proposed by the legislative body. If, at the expiration of forty days, one-tenth of the primary assemblies in one-half of the departments vote No, there is a suspensive veto. In that event all the primary assemblies of the Republic must be convoked and if the majority still decides in the negative, that is a definitive veto. The same formalities govern a revision of the established constitution.—In all this, the plan of the "Montagnards" is a further advance on that of the Girondins; never was so insignificant a part assigned to the rulers nor so extensive a part to the governed. The Jacobins profess a respect for the popular initiative which amounts to a scruple.[1109] According to them the sovereign people should be sovereign de facto, permanently, and without interregnum, allowed to interfere in all serious affairs, and not only possess the right, but the faculty, of imposing its will on its mandatories.—All the stronger is the reason for referring to it the institutions now being prepared for it. Hence the Convention, after the parade is over, convokes the primary assemblies and submits to them for ratification the Constitutional bill has been drawn up.
III. Primary Assemblies
Primary Assemblies.—Proportion of Absentees.—Unanimity of
the voters.—Their motives for accepting the Constitution.
—Pressure brought to bear on voters.—Choice of Delegates.
The ratification will, undoubtedly, be approved. Everything has been combined beforehand to secure it, also to secure it as wanted, apparently spontaneously, and almost unanimously.—The primary assemblies, indeed, are by no means fully attended; only one-half, or a quarter, or a third of the electors in the cities deposit their votes, while in the rural districts there is only a quarter, and less.[1110] Repelled by their experience with previous convocations the electors know too well the nature of these assemblies; how the Jacobin faction rules them, how it manages the electoral comedy, with what violence and threats it reduces all dissidents to voting either as figurants or claqueurs. From four to five million of electors prefer to hold aloof and stay at home as usual. Nevertheless the organization of most of the assemblies takes place, amounting to some six or seven thousand. This is accounted for by the fact that each canton contains its small group of Jacobins. Next to these come the simple-minded who still believe in official declarations; in their eyes a constitution which guarantees private rights and institutes public liberties must be accepted, no matter what hand may present it to them. And all the more readily because the usurpers offer to resign; in effect, the Convention has just solemnly declared that once the Constitution is adopted, the people shall again be convoked to elect "a new national assembly... a new representative body invested with a later and more immediate trust,"[1111] which will allow electors, if they are so disposed, to return honest deputies and exclude the knaves who now rule. Thereupon even the insurgent departments, the mass of the Girondins population, after a good deal of hesitation, resign themselves at last to voting for it.[1112] This is done at Lyons and in the department of Calvados only on the 30th of July. A number of Constitutionalists or neutrals have done the same thing, some through a horror of civil war and a spirit of conciliation, and others through fear of persecution and of being taxed with royalism;[1113] one conception more: through docility they may perhaps succeed in depriving the "Mountain" of all pretext for violence.
In this they greatly deceive themselves, and, from the first, they are able to see once more the Jacobins interpretation of electoral liberty.—At first, all the registered,[1114] and especially the "suspects," are compelled to vote, and to vote Yes; otherwise, says a Jacobin journal,[1115] "they themselves will indicate the true opinion one ought to have of their attitudes, and no longer have reason to complain of suspicions that are found to be so well grounded." They come accordingly, "very humbly and very penitent." Nevertheless they meet with a rebuff, and a cold shoulder is turned on them; they are consigned to a corner of the room, or near the doors, and are openly insulted. Thus received, it is clear that they will keep quiet and not risk the slightest objection. At Macon "a few aristocrats muttered to themselves, but not one dared say No."[1116] It would, indeed, be extremely imprudent. At Montbrison, "six individuals who decline to vote," are denounced in the procès-verbal of the Canton, while a deputy in the Convention demands "severe measures" against them. At Nogent-sur-Seine, three administrators, guilty of the same offense, are to be turned out of office.[1117] A few months later, the offense becomes a capital crime, and people are to be guillotined "for having voted against the Constitution of 1793."[1118] Almost all the ill-disposed foresaw this danger; hence, in nearly all the primary assemblies, the adoption is unanimous, or nearly unanimous.[1119] At Rouen, there are but twenty-six adverse votes; at Caen, the center of the Girondin opposition, fourteen; at Rheims, there are only two; at Troyes, Besançon, Limoges and Paris, there are none at all; in fifteen departments the number of negatives varies from five to one; not one is found in Var; this apparent unity is most instructive. The commune of St. Donau, the only one in France, in the remote district of Cotês-du-Nord, dares demand the restoration of the clergy and the son of Capet for king. All the others vote as if directed with a baton; they have understood the secret of the plebiscite; that it is a Jacobin demonstration, not an honest vote, which is required.[1120] The operation undertaken by the local party is actually carried out. It beats to arms around the ballot-box; it arrives in force; it alone speaks with authority; it animates officers; it moves all the resolutions and draws up the report of proceedings, while the representatives on mission from Paris add to the weight of the local authority that of the central authority. In the Macon assembly "they address the people on each article; this speech is followed by immense applause and redoubled shouting of Vive la République! Vive la Constitution! Vive le Peuple Français!" Beware, ye lukewarm, who do not join in the chorus! They are forced to vote "in a loud, intelligible voice." They are required to shout in unison, to sign the grandiloquent address in which the leaders testify their gratitude to the Convention, and give their adhesion to the eminent patriots delegated by the primary assembly to bear its report to Paris.[1121]
IV. The Delegates reach Paris
The Delegates reach Paris.—Precautions taken against them.
—Constraints and Seductions.
The first act of the comedy is over and the second act now begins.—The faction has convoked the delegates of the primary assemblies to Paris for a purpose. Like the primary assemblies, they are to serve as its instruments for governing; they are to form the props of dictatorship, and the object now is to restrict them to that task only.—Indeed, it is not certain that all will lend themselves to it. For, among the eight thousand commissioners, some, appointed by refractory assemblies, bring a refusal instead of an adhesion;[1122] others, more numerous, are instructed to present objections and point out omissions:[1123] it is very certain that the envoys of the Girondist departments will insist on the release or return of their excluded representatives. And lastly, a good many delegates who have accepted the Constitution in good faith desire its application as soon as possible, and that the Convention should fulfill its promise of abdication, so as to give way to a new Assembly.—As it is important to suppress at once all these vague desires for independence or tendencies for opposition a decree of the Convention "authorizes the Committee of General Security to order the arrest of 'suspect' commissioners;" it is especially to look after those who, "charged with a special mission, would hold meetings to win over their colleagues,.... and engage them in proceedings contrary to their mandate."[1124] In the first place, and before they are admitted into Paris, their Jacobinism is to be verified, like a bale in the customs-house, by the special agents of the executive council, and especially by Stanislas Maillard, the famous September judge, and his sixty-eight bearded ruffians, each receiving pay at five francs a day. "On all the roads, within a circuit of fifteen or twenty leagues of the capital," the delegates are searched; their trunks are opened, and their letters read. At the barriers in Paris they find "inspectors" posted by the Commune, under the pretext of protecting them against prostitutes and swindlers. There, they are taken possession of, and conducted to the mayoralty, where they receive lodging tickets, while a picket of gendarmerie escorts them to their allotted domiciles.[1125]—Behold them in pens like sheep, each in his numbered stall; there is no fear of the dissidents trying to escape and form a band apart: one of them, who comes to the Convention and asks for a separate hall for himself and his adherents, is snubbed in the most outrageous manner; they denounce him as an intriguer, and accuse him of a desire to defend the traitor Castries; they take his name and credentials, and threaten him with an investigation.[1126] The unfortunate speaker hears the Abbaye alluded to, and evidently thinks himself fortunate to escape sleeping there that night.—After this, it is certain that he will not again demand the privilege of speaking, and that his colleagues will remain quiet; and all this is the more likely
* because the revolutionary tribunal holds permanent sessions under their eyes,
* because the guillotine is set up and in operation on the "Place de la Révolution;"
* because a recent act of the Commune enjoins on the police "the most active surveillance" and "constant patrols" by the armed force;
* because, from the first to the fourth of August, the barriers are closed;
* because, on the 2nd of August, a raid into three of the theaters puts five hundred young men in the lock-up,[1127]
so the discontented soon discover, if there are any, that this is not the time or the place to protest.
As to the others, already Jacobin, the faction takes it upon itself to render them still more so.—Lost in the immensity of Paris, all these provincials require moral as well as physical guides; it agrees to exercise toward them "hospitality in all its plenitude, the sweetest of Republican virtues."[1128] Hence, ninety-six sans-culottes, selected from among the sections, wait on them at the Mayoralty to serve as their correspondents, and perhaps as their guarantees, and certainly as pilots
* to give them lodging-tickets,
* to escort and install them,
* to indoctrinate them, as formerly with the federates of July, 1792,
* to prevent their getting into bad company,
* to introduce them into all the exciting meetings,
* to see that their ardent patriotism quickly rises to the proper temperature of Parisian Jacobinism.[1129]
The theaters must not offend their eyes or ears with pieces "opposed to the spirit of the Revolution."[1130] An order is issued for the performance three times a week of "republican tragedies, such as 'Brutus', 'William Tell', 'Caius Gracchus,' and other dramas suitable for the maintenance of the principles of equality and liberty." Once a week the theaters must be free, when Chéniér's alexandrines are spouted on the stage to the edification of the delegates, crowded into the boxes at the expense of the State. The following morning, led in groups into the tribunes of the Convention,[1131] they there find the same, classic, simple, declamatory, sanguinary tragedy, except that the latter is not feigned but real, and the tirades are in prose instead of in verse. Surrounded by paid yappers like victims for the ancient Romans celebrations of purifications, our provincials applaud, cheer and get excited, the same as on the night before at the signal given by the claqueurs and the regulars. Another day, the procureur-syndic Lhullier summons them to attend the "Evéché," to "fraternize with the authorities of the Paris department;"[1132] the "Fraternité" section invites them to its daily meetings; the Jacobin club lends them its vast hall in the morning and admits them to its sessions in the evening.—Thus monopolized and kept, as in a diving bell, they breathe in Paris nothing but a Jacobin atmosphere; from one Jacobin den to another, as they are led about in this heated atmosphere, their pulse beats more rapidly. Many of them, who, on their arrival, were "plain, quiet people,"[1133] but out of their element, subjected to contagion without any antidote, quickly catch the revolutionary fever. The same as at an American revival, under the constant pressure of preaching and singing, of shouts and nervous spasms, the lukewarm and even the indifferent have not long to wait before the delirium puts them in harmony with the converted.
V. Fête of August 10th
They make their profession of Jacobin faith.—Their part in
the Fête of August 10th.—Their enthusiasm.
On the 7th of August things come to a head.—Led by the department and the municipality, a number of delegates march to the bar of the Convention, and make a confession of Jacobin faith. "Soon," they exclaim, "will search be made on the banks of the Seine for the foul marsh intended to engulf us. Were the royalist and intriguers to die of spite, we will live and die 'Montagnards.'"[1134] Applause and embraces.—From thence they betake themselves to the Jacobin Club, where one of them proposes an address prepared beforehand: the object of this is to justify the 31st of May, and the 2nd of June, "to open the eyes" of provincial France, to declare "war against the federalists."[1135] "Down with the infamous libelers who have calumniated Paris!.... We cherish but one sentiment, our souls are all melted into one... We form here but one vast, terrible mountain, about to vomit forth its fires on the royalists and supporters of tyranny." Applause and cheers.—Robespierre declares that they are there to save the country.[1136] On the following day, August 8th, this address is presented to the Convention and Robespierre has a resolution adopted, ordering it to be sent to the armies, to foreign powers and all the Communes. More applause, more embraces, and more cheers.—On the 9th of August,[1137] by order of the Convention, the delegates meet in the Tuileries garden, where, divided into as many groups as there are departments, they study the program drawn up by David, in order to familiarize themselves with the parts they are to play in the festival of the following day.
What an odd festival and how well it expresses the spirit of the time! It is a sort of opera played in the streets by the public authorities, with triumphant chariots, altars, censers, an Ark of the Covenant, funeral urns, classic banners and other trappings! Its divinities consist of plaster statues representing Nature, Liberty, the People, and Hercules, all of which are personified abstractions, like those painted on the ceiling of a theater. In all this there is no spontaneity nor sincerity; the actors, whose consciences tell them that they are only actors, render homage to symbols which they know to be nothing but symbols, while the mechanical procession,[1138] the invocations, the apostrophes, the postures, the gestures are regulated beforehand, the same as by a ballet-manager. To any truth-loving person all this must seem like a charade performed by puppets.—But the festival is colossal, well calculated to stimulate the imagination and excite pride through physical excitement.[1139] On this grandiose stage the delegates become quite intoxicated with their part; for, evidently, theirs is the leading part; they represent twenty-six millions of Frenchmen, and the sole object of this ceremony is to glorify the national will of which they are the bearers.—On the Place de la Bastille[1140] where the gigantic effigy of nature pours forth from its two breasts "the regenerating water," Hérault, the president, after offering libations and saluting the new goddess, passes the cup to the eighty-seven elders (les doyens) of the eighty-seven departments, each "summoned by sound of drum and trumpet" to step forward and drink in his turn, while cannon belch forth their thunders as if for a monarch. After the eighty-seven have passed the cup around, the artillery roars. The procession them moves on, and the delegates again are assigned the place of honor. The elders, holding an olive-branch in one hand, and a pike in the other, with a streamer on the end of it bearing the name of their department, "bound to each other by a small three-color ribbon," surround the Convention as if to convey the idea that the nation maintains and conducts its legal representative. Behind them march the rest of the eight thousand delegates, likewise holding olive-branches and forming a second distinct body, the largest of all, and on which all eyes are centered. For, in their wake, "their is no longer any distinction between persons and functionaries," all being confounded together, marching pell-mell, executive council, city officials, judges scattered about haphazard and, by virtue of equality, lost in the crowd. At each station, thanks to their insignia, the delegates form the most conspicuous element. On reaching the last one, that of the Champ de Mars, they alone with the Convention, ascend the steps leading to the alter of the country; on the highest platform stands the eldest of all alongside the president of the Convention, also standing; thus graded above each other, the seven thousand, who envelope the seven hundred and fifty, form "the veritable Sacred Mountain." Now, the president, on the highest platform, turns toward the eighty-seven elders; he confides to the Ark containing the Constitutional Act and the list of those who voted for it; they, on their part, then advance and hand him their pikes, which he gathers together into one bundle as an emblem of national unity and indivisibility. At this, shouts arise from every point of the immense enclosure; salvoes of artillery follow again and again; "one would say that heaven and earth answered each other" in honor "of the greatest epoch of humanity."—Certainly, the delegates are beside themselves; their nerves, strained to the utmost, vibrates too powerfully; the millennium discloses itself before their eyes. Already, many among them on the Place de la Bastille, had addressed the universe; others, "seized with a prophetic spirit," promise eternity to the Constitution. They feel themselves "reborn again, along with the human species;" they regard themselves as beings of a new world. History is consummated in them; the future is in their hands; they believe themselves gods on earth.—In this critical state, their reason, like a pair of ill-balanced scales, yields to the slightest touch; under the pressure of the manufacturers of enthusiasm, a sudden reaction will carry them away. They consider the Constitution as a panacea, and they are going to consign it, like some dangerous drug, to this coffer which they call an ark. They have just proclaimed the liberty of the people, and are going to perpetuate the dictatorship of the Convention.
VI. The Mountain.
Maneuvers of the "Mountain."—The Jacobin Club on the eve of
August 11th.—Session of the Convention on the 11th of
August.—The Delegates initiate Terror.—Popular
consecration of the Jacobin dictatorship.
This volteface has, of course, to appear spontaneous and the hand of the titular rulers remain invisible: the Convention, as usual with usurpers, is to simulate reserve and disinterestedness.—Consequently, the following morning, August 11, on the opening of the session, it simply declares that "its mission is fulfilled:"[1141] on the motion of Lacroix, a confederate of Danton's, it passes a law that a new census of the population and of electors shall be made with as little delay as possible, in order to convoke the primary assemblies at once; it welcomes with joy the delegates who bring to it the Constitutional Ark; the entire Assembly rises in the presence of this sacred receptacle, and allows the delegates to exhort it and instruct it concerning its duties.[1142] But in the evening, at the Jacobin Club, Robespierre, after a long and vague discourse on public dangers, conspiracies, and traitors, suddenly utters the decisive words:
"The most important of my reflections was about to escape me[1143]... The proposition made this morning will only facilitate the replacement of the purified members of this Convention by the envoys of Pitt and Cobourg."
Dreadful words in the mouth of a man of principles! They are at once understood by the leaders, great and small, also by the selected fifteen hundred Jacobins then filling the hall. "No! no! shouts the entire club." The delegates are carried away:
"I demand," exclaims one of them, "that the dissolution of the Convention be postponed until the end of the war."—
At last, the precious motion, so long desired and anticipated, is made: the calumnies of the Girondins now fall the ground; it is demonstrated that the Convention does not desire to perpetuate itself and that it has no ambition; if it remains in power it is because it is kept there; the delegates of the people compel it to stay.
And better still, they are going to mark out its course of action.—The next day, the 12th of August, with the zeal of new converts, they spread themselves through the hall in such numbers that Assembly, no longer able to carry on is deliberations, crowds toward the left and yields the whole of the space on the right that they may occupy and "purify" it.[1144] All the combustible material in their minds, accumulated during the past fortnight, takes fire and explodes; they are more furious than the most ultra Jacobins; they repeat at the bar of the house the extravagances of Rose Lacombe, and of the lowest clubs; they even transcend the program drawn up by the "Mountain." "The time for deliberation is past," exclaims their spokesman, "we must act[1145]... Let the people rouse themselves in a mass... it alone can annihilate its enemies... We demand that all 'suspects' be put under arrest; that they be dispatched to the frontiers, followed by the terrible mass of sans-culottes. There, in the front ranks, they will be obliged to fight for that liberty which they have outraged for the past four years, or be immolated on the tyrants' cannon.... Women, children, old men and the infirm shall be kept as hostages by the women and children of sans-culottes." Danton seizes the opportunity. With his usual lucidity he finds the expression which describes the situation:
"The deputies of the primary assemblies," he says, "have just begun to practice among us the initiative of terror."
He moreover reduces the absurd notions of the fanatics to a practical measure: "A mobilization en masse, yes, but with order" by at once calling out the first class of conscript, all men from eighteen to twenty-five years of age; the arrest of all 'suspects', yes, but not to lead them against the enemy; "they would be more dangerous than useful in our armies; let us shut them up; they will be our hostages."—He also proposes employment for the delegates who are only in the way in Paris and might be useful in the provinces. Let us make of them "various kinds of representatives charged with animating citizens... Let them, along with all good citizens and the constituted authorities, take charge of the inventories of grain and arms, and make requisitions for men, and let the Committee of Public Safety direct this sublime movement.... All will swear that, on returning to their homes, they will give this impulse their fellow citizens." Universal applause; the delegates exclaim in one voice, "We swear!" Everybody springs to his feet; the men in the tribunes wave their hats and likewise should the same oath.—The scheme is successful; a semblance of popular will has authorized the staff of officials, the policy, the principles and the very name of Terror. As to the instruments for the operation they are all there ready to be back into action. The delegates, of whose demands and interference the "Mountain" is still in dread, are sent back to their departmental holes, where they shall serve as agents and missionaries.[1146] There is no further mention of putting the Constitution into operation; this was simply a bait, a decoy, contrived for fishing in turbid waters: the fishing ended, the Constitution is now placed in a conspicuous place in the hall, in a small monument for which David furnished the design.[1147]—The Convention, now, says Danton, "will rise to a sense of its dignity, for it is now invested with the full power of the nation." In other words, artifice completes what violence has begun. Through the outrages committed in May and June, the Convention had lost its legitimacy; through the maneuvers of July and August it recovered the semblance of it. The Montagnards still hold their slave by his lash, but they have restored his prestige so as to make the most of him to their own profit.
VII. Extent and Manifesto of the departmental insurrection
Effect of this maneuver.—Extent and Manifesto of the
departmental insurrection.—Its fundamental weakness.—The
mass of the population inert and distrustful.—The small
number of Girondists.—Their lukewarm adherents.—Scruples
of fugitive deputies and insurgent administrators.—They
form no central government.—They leave military authority
in the hands of the Convention.—Fatal progress of their
concessions.—Withdrawal of the departments one by one.
—Retraction of the compromised authorities.—Effect of
administrative habits.—Failings and illusions of the
Moderates.—Opposite character of the Jacobins.
With the same blow, and amongst the same playacting, they have nearly disarmed their adversaries.—On learning the events of May 31 and June 2, a loud cry of indignation arose among republicans of the cultivated class in this generation, who, educated by the philosophers, sincerely believed in the rights of man.[1148] Sixty-nine department administrations had protested,[1149] and, in almost all the towns of the west, the south, the east and the center of France, at Caen, Alençon, Evreux, Rennes, Brest, Lorient, Nantes and Limoges, at Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier, Nîmes and Marseilles, at Grenoble, Lyons, Clermont, Lons-le-Saunier, Besançon, Mâcon and Dijon,[1150] the citizens, assembled in their sections, had provoked, or maintained by cheering them on, the acts of their administrators. Rulers and citizens, all declared that, the Convention not being free, its decrees after the 31st of May, no longer had the force of law; that the troops of the departments should march on Paris to deliver that city from its oppressors, and that their substitutes should be called out and assemble at Bourges. In many places words were converted into acts. Already before the end of May, Marseilles and Lyons had taken up arms and checkmated their local Jacobins. After the 2nd of June, Normandy, Brittany, Gard, Jura, Toulouse and Bordeaux, had also raised troops. At Marseilles, Bordeaux and Caen representatives on mission, arrested or under guard, were retained as hostages.[1151] At Nantes, the national Guard and popular magistrates who, a week before, had so bravely repulsed the great Vendéan army, dared to more than this; they limited the powers of the Convention and condemned all meddling: according to them, the sending of representatives on mission was "an usurpation, an attack on national sovereignty;" representatives had been elected
"to make and not to execute laws, to prepare a constitution and regulate all public powers, and not to confound these together and exercise them all at once; to protect and maintain intermediary powers which the people have delegated, and not to encroach upon and annihilate them."[1152]
With still greater boldness, Montpellier enjoined all representatives everywhere to meet at the headquarters of their respective departments, and await the verdict of a national jury. In short, in accordance with the very democratic creed, "nothing was visible amid the ruins of the Convention," mutilated and degraded, but interloping "attorneys." "The people's workmen" are summoned "to return to obedience and do justice to the reproaches addressed to them by their legitimate master;"[1153] the nation canceled the pay of its clerks at the capital, withdrew the mandate they had misused, and declared them usurpers if they persisted in not yielding up their borrowed sovereignty "to its inalienable sovereignty."—To this stroke, which strikes deep, the "Mountain" replies by a similar stroke; it also renders homage to principles and falls back on the popular will. Through the sudden manufacture of an ultra-democratic constitution, through a convocation of the primary assemblies, and a ratification of its work by the people in these assemblies, through the summoning of delegates to Paris, through the assent of these converted, fascinated, or constrained delegates, it exonerates and justifies itself, and thus deprives the Girondins of the grievances to which they had given currency, of the axioms they had displayed on their standards, and of the popularity they thought they had acquired.[1154]—Henceforth, the ground their opponents had built on sinks under their feet; the materials collected by them disintegrate in their hands; their league dissolves before it is completed, and the incurable weakness of the party appears in full daylight.
Firstly, in the departments, as at Paris,[1155] the party has no roots. For the past three years all the sensible and orderly people, occupied with their own affairs, who has no taste or interest in politics, nine-tenths of the electors, abstain from voting and in this large mass the Girondins have no adherents. As they themselves admit,[1156] this class remains attached to the institutions of 1791, which they have overthrown; if it has any esteem for them, it is as "extremely honest madmen." Again, this esteem is mingled with aversion: it reproaches them with the violent decrees they have passed in concert with the "Mountain;" with persecutions, confiscations, every species of injustice and cruelty; it always sees the King's blood on their hands; they, too, are regicides, anti-Catholics, anti-Christians, demolishers and levelers.[1157]—Undoubtedly they are less so than the "Mountain;" hence, when the provincial insurrection breaks out, many Feuillants and even Royalists follow them to the section assemblies and join in their protests. But the majority goes no further, and soon falls back into is accustomed inertia. It is not in harmony with its leaders:[1158] its latent preferences are opposed to their avowed program; it does not wholly trust them; it has only a half-way affection for them; its recent sympathies are deadened by old animosities: everywhere, instead of firmness there is only caprice. All this affords no assurance of steadfast loyalty and practical adhesion. The Girondin deputies scattered through the provinces relied upon each department arousing itself at their summons and forming a republican Vendée against the "Mountain:" nowhere do they find anything beyond mild approval and speculative hopes.
There remains to support them the élite of the republican party, the scholars and lovers of literature, who are honest and sincere thinkers, who, worked upon by the current dogmas, have accepted the philosophical catechism literally and seriously. Elected judges, or department, district, and city administrators, commanders and officers of the National Guard, presidents and secretaries of sections, they occupy most of the places conferred by local authority, and hence their almost unanimous protest seems at first to be the voice of France. In reality, it is only the despairing cry of a group of staff-officers without an army. Chosen under the electoral pressure with which we are familiar, they possess rank, office and titles, but no credit or influence; they are supported only by those whom they really represent, that is to say, those who elected them, a tenth of the population, and forming a sectarian minority. Again, in this minority there are a good many who are lukewarm; with most men the distance is great between conviction and action; the interval is filled up with acquired habits, indolence, fear and egoism. One's belief in the abstractions of the "Contrat-social" is of little account; no one readily bestirs oneself for an abstract end. Uncertainties beset one at the outset; the road one has to follow is found to be perilous and obscure, and one hesitates and postpones; one feels himself a home-body and is afraid of engaging too deeply and of going too far. Having expended one's breath in words one is less willing to give one's money; another may open his purse but he may not be disposed to give himself, which is as true of the Girondins as it is of the Feuillants.
"At Marseilles,[1159] at Bordeaux," says a deputy, "in nearly all the principal towns, the proprietor, slow, indifferent and timid, could not make up his mind to leave home for a moment; it was to mercenaries that he entrusted his cause his arms."
Only the federates of Mayenne, Ile-et-Vilaine, and especially of Finisterre, were "young men well brought up and well informed about the cause they were going to support." In Normandy, the Central Committee, unable to do better, has to recruit its soldiers, and especially gunners, from the band of Carabots, former Jacobins, a lot of ruffians ready for anything, pillagers and runaways at the first canon-shot. At Caen, Wimpffen, having ordered the eight battalions of the National Guard to assemble in the court, demands volunteers and finds that only seventeen step forth; on the following day a formal requisition brings out only one hundred and thirty combatants; other towns, except Vire, which furnishes about twenty, refuse their contingent. In short, a marching army cannot be formed, or, if it does march, it halts at the first station, that of Evreux before reaching Vernon, and that of Marseilles at the walls of Avignon.
On the other hand, by virtue of being sincere and logical, those who have rebelled entertain scruples and themselves define the limits of their insurrection. The fugitive deputies at their head would believe themselves guilty of usurpation had they, like the "Mountain" at Paris, constituted themselves at Caen en sovereign assembly[1160]: according to them, their right and their duty is reduced to giving testimony concerning the 31st of May and the 1st of June, and to exhorting the people and to being eloquent. They are not legally qualified to take executive power; it is for the local magistrates, the élus(elected) of the sections, and better still, the department committees to command in the departments. Lodged as they are in official quarters, they are merely to print formal statements, write letters, and, behaving properly, wait until the sovereign people, their employer, reinstates them. It has been outraged in their persons; it must avenge itself for this outrage; since it approves of its mandatories, it is bound to restore them to office; it being the master of the house, it is bound to have its own way in the house.—As to the department committees, it is true that, in the heat of the first excitement, they thought of forming a new Convention at Bourges,[1161] either through a muster of substitute deputies, or through the convocation of a national commission of one hundred and seventy members. But time is wanting, also the means, to carry out the plan; it remains suspended in the air like vain menace; at the end of a fortnight it vanishes in smoke; the departments succeed in federating only in scattered groups; they desist from the formation of a central government, and thus, through this fact alone, condemn themselves to succumb, one after the other, in detail, and each at home.—What is worse, through conscientiousness and patriotism, they prepare their own defeat: the refrain from calling upon the armies and from stripping the frontiers; they do not contest the right of the Convention to provide as it pleases for the national defense. Lyons allows the passage of convoys of cannon-balls which are to be subsequently used in cannonading its defenders[1162]. The authorities of Puy-de-Dome aid by sending to Vendée the battalion that they had organized against the "Mountain." Bordeaux is to surrender Chateau-Trompette, its munitions of war and supplies, to the representatives on mission; and, without a word, with exemplary docility, both the Bordeaux battalions which guard Blaye suffer themselves to be dislodged by two Jacobin battalions.[1163] Comprehending the insurrection in this way, defeat is certain beforehand.
The insurgents are thus conscious of their false position; they have a vague sort of feeling that, in recognizing the military authority of the Convention, they admit its authority in full; insensibly they glide down this slope, from concession to concession, until they reach complete submission. From the 16th of June, at Lyons,[1164] "people begin to feel that it ought not break with the Convention." Five weeks later, the authorities of Lyons "solemnly recognize that the Convention is the sole central rallying point of all French citizens and republicans," and decree that "all acts emanating from it concerning the general interests of the republic are to be executed."[1165] Consequently, at Lyons and in other departments, the administrations convoke the primary assemblies as the Convention has prescribed; consequently, the primary assemblies accept the Constitution which it has proposed; consequently, the delegates of the primary assemblies betake themselves to Paris according to its orders.—Henceforth, the Girondins' cause is lost; the discharge of a few cannon at Vernon and Avignon disperse the only two columns of soldiery that have set out on their march. In each department, the Jacobins, encouraged by the representatives on mission, raise their heads; everywhere the local club enjoins the local government to submit,[1166] everywhere the local governments report the acts they pass, make excuses and ask forgiveness. Proportionately to the retraction of one department, the rest, feeling themselves abandoned, are more disposed to retract. On the 9th of July forty-nine departments are enumerated as having given in their adhesion. Several of them declare that the scales have dropped from their eyes, that they approve of the acts of May 31 and June 2, and thus ensure their safety by manifesting their zeal. The administration of Calvados notifies the Breton fédérés that "having accepted the Constitution it can no longer tolerate their presence in Caen;" it sends them home, and secretly makes peace with the "Mountain;" and only informs the deputies, who are its guests, of this proceeding, three days afterwards, by postings on their door the decree that declares them outlaws.
Disguised as soldiers, the latter depart along with the Breton fédérés; on the way, they are able to ascertain the veritable sentiments of this people whom they believe imbued with their rights and capable of taking a political initiative.[1167] The pretended citizens and republicans they have to do with are, in sum, the former subjects of Louis XVI. and the future subjects of Napoleon I., that is to say, administrators and people, disciplined by habit and instinctively subordinate, requiring a government just as sheep require a shepherd and a watch-dog, accepting or submitting to shepherd and dog, provided these look and act the part, even if the shepherd be a butcher and the dog a wolf. To avoid isolation, to rejoin the most numerous herd as soon as possible, to always form masses and bodies and thus follow the impulsion which comes from above, and gather together scattered individuals, such is the instinct of the flock.
In the battalion of federates, they begin by saying that, as the Constitution is now accepted and the convention recognized, it is no longer allowed to protect deputies whom it has declared outlaws: "that would be creating a faction." Thereupon, the deputies withdraw from the battalion, and, in a little squad by themselves, march along separately. As they are nineteen in number, resolute and well armed, the authorities of the market-towns through which they pass make no opposition by force; it would be offering battle, and that surpasses a functionary's zeal; moreover, the population is either indifferent toward them or sympathetic. Nevertheless, efforts are made to stop them, sometimes to surround them and take them by surprise; for, a warrant of arrest is out against them, transmitted through the hierarchical channel, and every local magistrate feels bound to do his duty as gendarme. Under this administrative network, the meshes of which they encounter everywhere, the proscribed deputies can do naught else but hide in caves or escape by sea.—On reaching Bordeaux, they find other sheep getting ready for the slaughter-house. Saige, the mayor, preaches conciliation and patience: he declines the aid of four or five thousand young men, three thousand grenadiers of the National Guard, and two or three hundred volunteers who had formed themselves into a club against the Jacobin club. He persuades them to disband; he sends a deputation to Paris to entreat the Convention to overlook "a moment of error" and pardon their "brethren who had gone astray."—"They flattered themselves," says a deputy, an eye-witness,[1168] "that prompt submission would appease the resentment of tyrants and that these would be, or pretend to be, generous enough to spare a town that had distinguished itself more than any other during the Revolution." Up to the last, they are to entertain the same illusions and manifest the same docility. When Tallien, with his eighteen hundred peasants and brigands, enters Bordeaux, twelve thousand National Guards, equipped, armed and in uniform, receive him wearing oak-leaf crowns; they listen in silence to "his astounding and outrageous discourse;" they suffer him to tear off their crowns, cockades and epaulettes; the battalions allow themselves to be disbanded on the spot; on returning to their quarters they listen with downcast eyes to the proclamation which "orders all inhabitants without distinction to bring their arms within thirty-six hours, under the penalty of death, to the glacis of the Chateau-Trompette; before the time elapses thirty thousand guns, swords, pistols and even pocket-knives are given up."
Here, as at Paris, on the 20th of June, 10th of August, 2nd of September, 3rd of May and 2nd of June, as at every critical moment of the Revolution in Paris and the provinces, habits of subordination and of amiability, stamped on a people by a provident monarchy and a time-honored civilization, have blunted in man the foresight of danger, his aggressive instinct, his independence and the faculty of depending upon himself only, the willingness to help one another and of saving himself. Inevitably, when anarchy brings a nation back to the state of nature, the tame animals will be eaten by the savage ones,—these are now let loose and immediately they show their true nature.
VIII. The Reasons for the Terror.
The last local resistance.—Political orthodoxy of the
insurgent towns.—They stipulate but one condition.—Reasons
of State for granting this.—Party arguments against it.
If the men of the "Mountain" had been statesmen, or even sensible men, they would have shown themselves humane, if not for the sake of humanity, at least through calculation; for in this France, so little republican, all the republican strength is not too great for the founding of the Republic, while, through their principles, their culture, their social position and their number, the Girondins form the élite and the force, the flower and the sap of the party.—The death-cry of the "Mountain" against the insurgents of Lozére[1169] and Vendée can be understood: they had raised the king's white flag; they accepted leaders and instructions from Coblentz and London. But neither Bordeaux, Marseilles nor Lyons are royalist, or in alliance with the foreigner.
"We, rebels!" write the Lyonnese;[1170] "Why we see no other than the tri-color flag waving; the white cockade, the symbol of rebellion, has never been raised within our walls. We, royalists! Why, shouts of 'Long live the Republic' are heard on all sides, and, spontaneously (in the session of July 2nd) we have all sworn to fall upon whoever should propose a king.... Your representatives tell you that we are anti-revolutionaries, we who have accepted the Constitution. They tell you that we protect émigrés when we have offered to surrender all those that you might indicate. They tell you that our streets are filled with refractory priests, when we have not even opened the doors of Pierre-en-Cize (prison) to the thirty-two priests confined there by the old municipality, without indictment, without any charge whatever against them, solely because they were priests."
Thus, at Lyons, the pretended aristocrats were, then, not only republicans but democrats and radicals, loyal to the established régime, and submissive to the worst of the revolutionary laws, while the same state of things prevailed at Bordeaux, at Marseilles and even at Toulon.[1171] And furthermore, they accepted the outrages of May 31 and June 2;[1172] they stopped contesting the usurpations of Paris; they no longer insisted on the return of the excluded deputies. On the 2nd of August at Bordeaux, and the 30th of July at Lyons, the Committee-Extraordinary of Public Safety resigned; there no longer existed any rival assembly opposed to the Convention. After the 24th of July,[1173] Lyons solemnly recognized the supreme and central authority, reserving nothing but its municipal franchises.—And better still, in striking testimony of political orthodoxy, the Council-General of the department prescribed a civic festival for the 10th of August analogous to that of Paris. The Lyonnese, already blockaded, indulged in no hostile manifestation; on the 7th of August they marched out of their advanced positions to fraternize with the first body of troops sent against them.[1174] They conceded everything, save on one point, which they could not yield without destruction, namely, the assurance that they should not be given up defenseless to the arbitrary judgment of their local tyrants, to the spoliation, proscriptions and revenge of the Jacobin rabble. In sum, at Marseilles and Bordeaux, especially at Lyons and Toulon, the sections had revolted only on that account; acting promptly and spontaneously, the people had thrust aside the knife which a few ruffians aimed at their throats; they had not been, and were not now, willing to be "Septemberised," that was their sole concern. Provided they were not handed over to the butchers bound hand and foot, they would open their gates. On these minimum terms the "Mountain" could terminate the civil war before the end of July. It had only to follow the example of Robert Lindet who, at Evreux the home of Buzot, at Caen the home of Charlotte Corday and the central seat of the fugitive Girondins, established permanent obedience through the moderation he had shown and the promises he had kept.[1175] The measures that had pacified the most compromised province would have brought back the others, and through this policy, Paris, without striking a blow, would have secured the three largest cities in France, the capital of the South-west, that of the South, and the capital of the Center.
On the contrary, should Paris persist in imposing on them the domination of its local Jacobins there was a risk of their being thrown into the arms of the enemy. Rather than fall back into the hands of the bandits who had ransomed and decimated them, Toulon, starved out, was about to receive the English within its walls and surrender to them the great arsenal of the South. Not less famished, Bordeaux might be tempted to demand aid from another English fleet; a few marches would brings the Piedmontese army to Lyons; France would then b cut in two, while the plan of stirring up the South against the North was proposed to the allies by the most clear-sighted of their councilors.[1176] Had this plan been carried out it is probably that the country would have been lost.—In any event, there was danger in driving the insurgents to despair: for, between the unbridled dictatorship of their victorious assassins and the musketry of the besieging army, there could be no hesitation by men of any feeling; it was better to be beaten on the ramparts than allow themselves to be bound for the guillotine; brought to a stand under the scaffold, their sole resource was to depend on themselves to the last.—Thus, through its unreasonableness, the "Mountain" condemns itself to a number of sieges or blockades which lasted several months,[1177] to leaving Var and Savoy unprotected, to exhausting the arsenals, to employing against Frenchmen[1178] troops and munitions needed against foreigners, and all this at the moment the foreigner was taking Valenciennes[1179] and Mayence, when thirty thousand royalist were organizing in Lozére, when the great Vendean army was laying siege to Nantes, when each new outbreak of fighting was threatening to connect the flaming frontier with the conflagration in the Catholic countries.[1180]—With a jet of cold water aptly directed, the "Mountain" could extinguish the fires it had kindled in the great republican towns; otherwise, nothing remained but to let them increase at the risk of consuming the whole country, with no other hope than that they might at last die out under a mass of ruins, and with no other object but to rule over captives and the dead.
But this is precisely the Jacobin aim; for, he is not satisfied with less than absolute submission; he must rule at any cost, just as he pleases, by fair means or foul, no matter over what ruins. A despot by instinct and installation, his dogma has consecrated him King; he is King by natural and divine right, in the name of eternal verity, the same as Philip II., enthroned by his religious system and blessed by his Holy Office. Hence he can abandon no jot or title of his authority without a sacrifice of principle, nor treat with rebels, unless they surrender at discretion; simply for having risen against legitimate authority, they are traitors and villains. And who are greater rascals the renegades who, after three years of patient effort, just as the sect finally reaches its goal, oppose its accession to power![1181] At Nîmes, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Toulon, and Lyons, not only have they interfered with or arrested the blow which Paris struck, but they have put down the aggressors, closed the club, disarmed the fanatical and imprisoned the leading Maratists; and worse still, at Lyons and at Toulon, five or six massacreurs, or promoters of massacre, Châlier and Riard, Jassaud, Sylvestre and Lemaille, brought before the courts, have been condemned and executed after a trial in which all the forms were strictly adhered to.—That is the inexpiable crime; for, in this trial, the "Mountain" is involved; the principles of Sylvestre and Châlier are its principles; what is accomplished in Paris, they have attempted in the provinces; if they are guilty, it is also guilty; it cannot tolerate their punishment without assenting to its own punishment. Accordingly,
* it must proclaim them heroes and martyrs,
* it must canonize their memory,[1182]
* it must avenge their tortures,
* it must resume and complete their assaults,
* it must restore their accomplices to their places,
* it must render them omnipotent,
* it must force each rebel city to accept the rule of its rabble and villains.
It matters little whether the Jacobins be a minority, whether at Bordeaux, they have but four out of twenty-eight sections on their side, at Marseilles five out of thirty-two, whether at Lyons they can count up only fifteen hundred devoted adherents.[1183] Suffrages are not reckoned, but weighed, for legality is founded, not on numbers, but on patriotism, the sovereign people being composed wholly of sans-culottes. So much the worse for towns where the anti-revolutionary majority is so great; they are only more dangerous; under the republican demonstrations is concealed the hostility of old parties and of the "suspect" classes, the Moderates, the Feuillants and Royalists, merchants, men of the legal profession, property-owners and muscadins.[1184] These towns are nests of reptiles and must be crushed out.
IX. Destruction of Rebel Cities
Bordeaux.—Marseilles.—Lyons.—-Toulon.
Consequently, obedient or disobedient, they are crushed out. They are declared traitors to the country, not merely the members of the departmental committees, but, at Bordeaux, all who have "aided or abetted the Committee of Public Safety;" at Lyons, all administrators, functionaries, military or civil officers who "convoked or tolerated the Rhône-et-Loire congress," and furthermore, "every individual whose son, clerk, servant, or even day-laborer, may have borne arms or contributed the means of resistance," that is to say, the entire National Guard who took up arms, and nearly all the population which gave its money or voted in the sections.[1185]—By virtue of this decree, all are "outlaws," or, in other words subject to the guillotine just on the establishment of their identity, and their property confiscated. Consequently, at Bordeaux, where not a gun had been fired, the mayor Saige, and principal author of the submission, is at once led to the scaffold without any form of trial,[1186] while eight hundred and eighty-one others succeed him amidst the solemn silence of a dismayed population.[1187] Two hundred prominent merchants are arrested in one night; more than fifteen hundred persons are imprisoned; all who are well off are ransomed, even those against who no political charge could be made; nine millions of fines are levied against "rich egoists." One of these,[1188] accused of "indifference and moderatism," pays twenty thousand francs "not to be harnessed to the car of the Revolution;" another "convicted of having shown contempt for his section and for the poor by giving thirty livres per months," is taxed at one million two hundred thousand livres, while the new authorities, a crooked mayor and twelve knaves composing the Revolutionary Committee, traffic in lives and property.[1189] At Marseilles, says Danton,[1190] the object is "to give the commercial aristocracy an important lesson;" we must "show ourselves as terrible to traders as to nobles and priests;" consequently, twelve thousand of them are proscribed and their possessions sold.[1191] From the first day the guillotine works as fast as possible; nevertheless, it does not work fast enough for Representative Fréron who finds the means for making it work faster.
"The military commission we have established in place of the revolutionary tribunal," he writes, "works frightfully fast against the conspirators.... They fall like hail under the sword of the law. Fourteen have already paid for their infamous treachery with their heads. To-morrow, sixteen more are to be guillotined, all chiefs of the legion, notaries, sectionists, members of the popular tribunal; to-morrow, also, three merchants will dance the carmagnole, and they are the ones we are after."[1192]
Men and things, all must perish; he wishes to demolish the city and proposes to fill up the harbor. Restrained with great difficulty, Fréron contents himself with a destruction of "the haunts" of the aristocracy, two churches, the concert-hall, the houses around it, and twenty-three buildings in which the rebel sections had held their meetings.
At Lyons, to increase the booty, the representatives had taken pains to encourage the manufacturers and merchants with vague promises; these opened their shops and brought their valuable goods, books and papers out of their hiding-places. No time is lost in seizing the plunder; "a list of all property belonging to the rich and to anti-revolutionaries" is drawn up, which is "confiscated for the benefit of the patriots of the city;" in addition to this a tax of six millions is imposed, payable in eight days, by those whom the confiscation may have still spared;[1193] it is proclaimed, according to principle, that the surplus of each individual belongs by right to the sans-culottes, and whatever may have been retained beyond the strictly necessary, is a robbery by the individual to the detriment of the nation.[1194] In conformity with this rule there is a general rounding up, prolonged for ten months, which places the fortunes of a city of one hundred and twenty thousand souls in the hands of its scoundrels. Thirty-two revolutionary committees "whose members are thick as thieves select thousands of guards devoted to them."[1195] In confiscated dwellings and warehouses, they affix seals without an inventory; they drive out women and children "so that there shall be no witnesses;" they keep the keys; they enter and steal when they please, or install themselves for a revel with prostitutes.—Meanwhile, the guillotine is kept going, and people are fired at and shot down with grape-shot. The revolutionary committee officially avow one thousand six hundred and eighty-two acts of murder committed in five months,[1196] while a confederate of Robespierre's privately declare that there were six thousand.[1197]
Blacksmiths are condemned to death for having shod the Lyonnese cavalry, firemen for having extinguished fires kindled by republican bombshells, a widow for having paid a war-tax during the siege, market women for "having shown disrespect to patriots." It is an organized "Septembrisade" made legal and lasting; its authors are so well aware of the fact as to use the word itself in their public correspondence.[1198]—At Toulon it is worse, people are slaughtered in heaps, almost haphazard. Notwithstanding that the inhabitants the most compromised, to the number of four thousand, take refuge on board English vessels, the whole city, say the representatives, is guilty. Four hundred workmen in the navy-yard having marched out to meet Fréron, he reminds them that they kept on working during the English occupation of the town, and he has them put to death on the spot. An order is issued to all "good citizens to assemble in the Champ de Mars on penalty of death." They come there to the number of three thousand; Fréron, on horseback, surrounded by cannon and troops, arrives with about a hundred Maratists, the former accomplices of Lemaille, Sylvestre, and other well-known assassins, who form a body of local auxiliaries and counselors; he tells them to select out of the crowd at pleasure according to their grudge, fancy, or caprice; all who are designated are ranged along a wall and shot. The next morning, and on the following days, the operation is renewed: Fréron writes on the 16th of Nivose that "eight hundred Toulonese have already been shot." ... "A volley of musketry," says he, in another letter, and after that, volley after volley, until "the traitors are all gone." Then, for three months after this, the guillotine dispatches eighteen hundred persons; eleven young women have to mount the scaffold together, in honor of a republican festival; an old woman of ninety-four is borne to it in an armchair. The population, initially of twenty-eight thousand people, is reduced to six or seven thousand only.
All this is not enough; the two cities that dared maintain a siege must disappear from the French soil. The Convention decrees that "the city of Lyons shall be destroyed: every house occupied by a rich man shall be demolished; only the dwellings of the poor shall remain, with edifices specially devoted to industry, and monuments consecrated to humanity and public education."[1199] The same at Toulon: "the houses within the town shall be demolished; only the buildings that are essential for army and navy purposes, for stores and munitions, shall be preserved."[11100] Consequently, a requisition is made in Var and the neighboring departments for twelve thousand masons to level Toulon to the ground.—At Lyons, fourteen thousand laborers pull down the Chateau Pierre-Encize; also the superb houses on Place Bellecour, those of the Quai St.-Clair, those of the Rues de Flandre and de Bourgneuf, and many others; the cost of all this amounts to four hundred thousand livres per decade; in six months the Republic expends fifteen millions in destroying property valued at three or four hundred millions, all belonging to the Republic.[11101] Since the Mongols of the fifth and thirteenth centuries, no such vast and irrational waste had been seen—such frenzy against the most profitable fruits of industry and human civilization.—Again, one can understand how the Mongols, who were nomads, desired to convert the soil into one vast steppe. But, to demolish a town whose arsenal and harbor is maintained by it, to destroy the leaders of manufacturing interests and their dwellings in a city where its workmen and factories are preserved, to keep up a fountain and stop the stream which flows from it, or the stream without the fountain, is so absurd that the idea could only enter the head of a Jacobin. His imagination has run so wild and his prevision become so limited that he is no longer aware of contradictions; the ferocious stupidity of the barbarian and the fixed idea of the inquisition meet on common ground; the earth is not big enough for any but himself and the orthodox of his species. Employing absurd, inflated and sinister terms he decrees the extermination of heretics: not only shall their monuments, dwellings and persons be destroyed, but every vestige of them shall be eradicated and their names lost to the memory of man.[11102]
"The name of Toulon shall be abolished; that commune shall henceforth bear the name of Port-la-Montagne."—"The name of Lyons shall be stricken off the list of towns belonging to the Republic; the remaining collection of houses shall henceforth bear the name of Ville-Affranchie. A column shall be erected on the ruins of Lyons bearing this inscription: 'Lyons made war on Liberty! Lyons is no more!'"
X. Destruction of the Girondin party
Destruction of the Girondin party.—Proscription of the
Deputies of the "Right".—Imprisonment of the 73.—Execution
of the 21.—Execution, suicide, or flight of the rest.
In all this there is no intention to spare in Paris the chiefs of the insurrection or of the party, either deputies or ministers; on the contrary, the object is to complete the subjection of the Convention, to stifle the murmurs of the "Right," to impose silence on Ducos, Boyer-Fonfrède, Vernier, and Couhey, who still speak and protest.[11103] Hence the decrees of arrest or death, launched weekly from the top of the "Mountain," fall on the majority like guns fired into a crowd. Decrees of accusation follow: on the 15th of June, against Duchâtel, on the 17th against Barbaroux, on the 23rd against Brissot, on the 8th of July against Devérité and Condorcet, on the 14th against Lauze-Deperret and Fauchet, on the 30th against Duprat Jr., Valée and Mainvielle, on the 2nd of August against Rouyer, Brunel and Carra; Carra, Lauze-Deperret and Fauchet, present during the session, are seized on the spot, which is plain physical warning: none is more effective to check the unruly.—Decrees are passed on the 18th of July accusing Coustard, on the 28th of July against Gensonné, La Source, Vergniaud, Mollevaut, Gardien, Grangeneuve, Fauchet, Boilleau, Valazé, Cussy, Meillan; each being aware that the tribunal before which he must appear is the waiting room to the guillotine.—Decrees of condemnation are passed on the 12th of July against Birotteau, the 28 of July against Buzot, Barbaroux, Gorsas, Lanjuniais, Salles, Louvet, Bergoeing, Pétion, Guadet, Chasset, Chambon, Lidon, Valady, Defermon, Kervelégen, Larivière, Rabaut-Saint-Étienne, and Lesage; pronounced outlaws and traitors, they are to be led to the scaffold without trial as soon as they can be got hold of.—Finally, on the 3rd of October, a great haul of the net in the Assembly itself sweeps off the benches all the deputies that still seem capable of any independence: the first thing is to close the doors of the hall, which is done by Amar, reporter of the Committee of General Security;[11104] then, after a declamatory and calumnious speech, which lasts two hours, he reads off names on two lists of proscriptions: forty-five deputies, more or less prominent among the Girondins, are to be at once summoned before the revolutionary tribunal; seventy-three others, who have signed secret protests against the 31st of May and 2nd of June, are to be put in jail. No arguing! the majority dares not even express an opinion. Some of the proscribed attempt to exculpate themselves, but they are not allowed to be heard; none but the Montagnards have the floor, and they do no more than add to the lists, each according to personal enmity; Levasseur has Vigée put down, and Duroi adds the name of Richon. One their names being called, all the poor creatures who happen to be inscribed, quietly advance and "huddle together within the bar of the house, like lambs destined to slaughter," and here they are separated into two flocks; on the one hand the seventy-three, and on the other, the ten or twelve who, with the Girondins already kept under lock and key, are to furnish the sacramental and popular number, the twenty-two traitors, whose punishment is a requirement of the Jacobin imagination;[11105] on the left, the batch for the prison; on the right, the batch for the guillotine.
To those who might be tempted to imitate them or defend them this is a sufficient lesson.—Subject to the boos, hisses and insults from the hags lining the streets, the seventy-three[11106] are conducted to the prisoners' room in the town hall. This, already full, is where they pass the night standing on benches, scarcely able to breathe. The next day they are crammed into the prison for assassins and robbers, "la Force," on the sixth story, under the roof; in this narrow garret their beds touch each other, while two of the deputies are obliged to sleep on the floor for lack of room. Under the skylights, which serve for windows, and at the foot of the staircase are two pig-pens; at the end of the apartment are the privies, and in one corner a night-tub, which completes the poisoning of the atmosphere already vitiated by this crowded mass of human beings. The beds consist of sacks of straw swarming with vermin; they are compelled to endure the discipline,[11107] rations and mess of convicts. And they are lucky to escape at this rate: for Amar takes advantage of their silent deportment to tax them with conspiracy; other Montagnards likewise want to arraign them at the revolutionary Tribunal: at all events, it is agreed that the Committee of General Security shall examine their records and maintain the right of designating new culprits amongst them. For ten months they thus remain under the knife, in daily expectation of joining the twenty-two on the Place de la Révolution.—With respect to the latter, the object is not to try them but to kill them, and the semblance of a trial is simply judicial assassination; the bill of indictment against them consists of club gossip; they are accused of having desired the restoration of the monarchy, of being in correspondence with Pitt and Coburg;[11108] of having excited Vendée to insurrection. The betrayal of Dumouriez is imputed to them, also the murder of Lepelletier, and the assassination of Marat; while pretended witnesses, selected from amongst their personal enemies, come and repeat, like a theme agreed upon, the same ill-contrived fable: nothing but vague allegations and manifest falsehoods, not one definite fact, not once convincing document; the lack of proof is such that the trial has to be stopped as soon as possible. "You brave b——forming the court," writes Hébert, "don't trifle away your time. Why so much ceremony in shortening the days of wretches whom the people have already condemned?" Care is especially taken not to let them have a chance to speak. The eloquence of Vergniaud and logic of Guadet might turn the tables at the last moment. Consequently, a prompt decree authorizes the tribunal to stop proceedings as soon as the jury becomes sufficiently enlightened, which is the case after the seventh session of the court, the record of death suddenly greeting the accused, who are not allowed to defend themselves. One of them, Valazé, stabs himself in open court, and the next day the national head-chopper strikes off the remaining twenty heads in thirty-eight minutes.—Still more expeditious are the proceedings against the accused who avoid a trial. Gorsas, seized in Paris on the 8th of October, is guillotined the same day. Birotteau, seized at Bordeaux, on the 24th of October, mounts the scaffold within twenty-four hours. The others, tracked like wolves, wandering in disguise from one hiding-place to another, and most of them arrested in turn, have only choice of several kinds of death. Cambon is killed in defending himself. Lidon, after having defended himself, blows out his brains, Condorcet takes poison in the guard-room of Bourg-la-Reine. Roland kills himself with his sword on the highway. Clavière stabs himself in prison. Rébecqui is found drowned in the harbor of Marseilles, and Pétion and Buzon half eaten by wolves on a moor of Saint-Emilion. Valady is executed at Périgueux, Dechézeau at Rochefort, Grangeneuve, Guadet, Salle and Barbaroux at Bordeaux, Coustard, Cussy, Rabout-Saint-Étienne, Bernard, Masuyer, and Lebrun at Paris. Even those who resigned in January, 1793, Kersaint and Manuel, atone with their lives for the crime of having sided with the "Right" and, of course, Madame Roland, who is taken for the leader of the party, is one of the first to be guillotined.[11109]—Of the one-hundred and eighty Girondins who led the Convention, one hundred and forty have perished or are in prison, or fled under sentence of death. After such a curtailment and such an example the remaining deputies cannot be otherwise than docile;[11110] neither in the central nor in the local government will the "Mountain" encounter resistance; its despotism is practically established, and all that remains is to proclaim this in legal form.
XI. Institutions of the Revolutionary Government
Institutions of the Revolutionary Government.—Its
principle, objects, proceedings, tools and structure.—The
Committee of Public Safety.—Subordination of the Convention
and ministry.—The use of the Committee of General Security
and the Revolutionary Tribunal.—Administrative
centralization.—Representatives on Mission, National Agents
and Revolutionary Committees.—Law of Lése-majesty.
—Restoration and Aggravation of the institutions of the old
monarchy.
After the 2nd of August, on motion of Bazire, the Convention decrees "that France is in revolution until its independence is recognized." which means[11111] that the period of hypocritical phrases has come to an end, that the Constitution was merely a signboard for a fair, and that the charlatans who had made use of it no longer need it, that it is to be put away in the store containing other advertising material, that individual, local and parliamentary liberties are abolished, that the government is arbitrary and absolute, that no institution, law, dogma, or precedent affords any guarantee for it against the rights of the people, that property and lives are wholly at its mercy, that there are no longer any rights of man.—Six weeks later, when, through the protest of the forty-five and the arrest of the seventy-three, obedience to the Convention is assured, all this is boldly and officially announced in the tribune. "Under the present circumstances of the Republic," says St. Just, "the Constitution cannot be implemented as this would enable attacks on liberty to take place because it would lack the violent measures necessary to repress these." We are no longer to govern "according to maxims of natural peace and justice; these maxims are only valid among the friends of liberty;" but they are not applicable between patriots and the malevolent. The latter are "outside our sovereignty," are lawless, excluded from the social pact, slaves in rebellion, to be punished or imprisoned, and, amongst the malevolent must be placed "the indifferent[11112]".—"You are to punish whoever is passive in the Republic and does nothing for it;" for his passivity is treason and ranks him among other public enemies. Now, between the people and its enemies, there is nothing in common but the sword; steel must control those who cannot be ruled "by justice"; the monarchical and neutral majority must be repressed (comprimé);
"The Republic will be founded only when the sans-culottes,[11113] the sole representatives of the nation, the only citizens, "shall rule by right of conquest."[11114]
The meaning of this is more than clear. The régime of which St. Just presents the plan, is that by which every oligarchy of invaders installs and maintains itself over a subjugated nation. Through this régime, in Greece, ten thousand Spartans, after the Dorian invasion, mastered three hundred thousand helots and périocques; through this régime, in England, sixty thousand Normans, after the battle of Hastings, mastered two million Saxons; through this régime in Ireland, since the battle of the Boyne, two hundred thousand English Protestants have mastered a million of Catholic Irish; through this régime, the three hundred thousand Jacobins of France will master the seven or eight millions of Girondins, Feuillants, Royalists or Indifferents.
This system of government is a very simple one and consist in maintaining the subject population in a state of extreme helplessness and of extreme terror. To this end, it is disarmed;[11115] it is kept under surveillance; all action in common is prohibited; its eyes should always be directed to the up-lifted ax and to the prison doors always open; it is ruined and decimated.—For the past six months all these rigors are decreed and applied,—disarmament of "suspects," taxes on the rich, the maximum against traders, requisitions on land-owners, wholesale arrests, rapid executions of sentences, arbitrary penalties of death, and publicized, multiplied tortures. For the past six months, all sorts of executive instruments are set up and put into operation: The Committee of Public Safety, the Committee of General Security, ambulating proconsuls with full power, local committees authorized to tax and imprison at will, a revolutionary army, a revolutionary tribunal. But, for lack of internal harmony and of central impulsion, the machine only half works, the power not being sufficient and its action not sufficiently sweeping and universal.
"You are too remote from the conspiracies against you," says St. Just;[11116] "it is essential that the sword of the law should everywhere be rapidly brandished and your arm be everywhere present to arrest crime.... The ministers confess that, beyond their first and second subordinates, they find nothing but inertia and indifference."—"A similar apathy is found in all the government agents," adds Billaud-Varennes;[11117] "the secondary authorities which are the strong points of the Revolution serve only to impede it." Decrees, transmitted through administrative channels, arrive slowly and are indolently applied. "You are missing that co-active force which is the principle of being, of action, of execution.... Every good government should possess a center of willpower and the levers connected with it.... Every government activity should exclusively originate from the central source."—
"In ordinary governments," says Couthon, finally,[11118] "the right of electing belongs to the people; you cannot take it away from them. In extraordinary governments all impulsion must come from the center; it is from the convention that elections must issue.... You would injure the people by confiding the election of officials to them, because you would expose them to electing men that would betray them."
—The result is that the constitutional maxims of 1789 give way to radically opposed maxims; instead of subjecting the government to the people, the people is made subject to the government. The hierarchy of the ancient régime is re-established under revolutionary terms, and henceforth all powers, much more formidable than those of the ancient régime, cease to be delegated from the depths to the summit and will henceforth instead be delegated from the summit to the bottom.
At the summit, a committee of twelve members, similar to the former royal council, exercises collective royalty; nominally, authority is divided amongst the twelve; it is, in practice, concentrated in a few hands. Several members occupy only a subaltern position, and amongst these, Barère, who, official secretary and mouthpiece, is always ready to make a speech or draft an editorial; others, with special functions, Jean Bon St. André, Lindet, and above all, Prieur de la Côte d'Or and Carnot, confine themselves each to his particular department, navy, war, supplies, with blank signatures, for which they give in return their signatures to the political leaders; the latter, called "the statesmen," Robespierre, Couthon, Saint-Just, Collot d'Herbois, Billaud-Varennes, are the real rulers providing overall direction. It is true that their mandate has to be renewed monthly; but this is a certainty, for, in the present state of the Convention, its vote, required beforehand, becomes an almost vain formality. More submissive than the parliament of Louis XIV., the Convention adopts, without discussion, the decrees which the Committee of Public Safety present to it ready made. It is no more than a registry-office, and scarcely that, for it has relinquished its right of appointing its own committees, that office being assigned to the Committee of Public Safety; it votes as a whole all lists of names which the Committee send in.[11119] Naturally, none but the creatures of the latter and the faithful are inscribed; thus, the whole legislative and parliamentary power belongs to it.—As to executive and administrative power, the ministers have become mere clerks of the Committee of Public Safety; "they come every day at specified hours to receive its orders and acts;[11120] "they submit to it "the list with explanations, of all the agents" sent into the departments and abroad; they refer to it every minute detail; they are its scribes, merely its puppets, so insignificant that they finally lose their title, and for the "Commission on External Relations" a former school-master is taken, an inept clubbist, bar-fly and the pillar of the billiard-room, scarcely able to read the documents brought to him to sign in the café where he passes his days.[11121]—Thus is the second power in the State converted by the Committee into a squad of domestics, while the foremost one is converted into an audience of claqueurs.
To make them do their duty, it has two hands.—One, the right, which seizes people unawares by the collar, is the Committee of General Security, composed of twelve extreme Montagnards, such as Panis, Vadier, Le Bas, Geoffroy, David, Amar, La Vicomterie, Lebon and Ruhl, all nominated, that is to say, appointed by it, being its confederates and subalterns. They are its lieutenants of police, and once a week they come and take part in its labors, as formerly the Sartines, and the Lenoirs assisted the Comptroller-general. A man who this secret committee deems a "suspect," is suddenly seized, no matter who, whether representative, minister, or general, and finds himself the next morning behind the bars in one of the ten new Bastilles.—There, the other hand seizes him by the throat; this is the revolutionary tribunal, an exceptional court like the extraordinary commissions of the ancient régime, only far more terrible. Aided by its police gang, the Committee of Public Safety itself selects the sixteen judges and sixty jurymen[11122] from among the most servile, the most furious, or the most brutal of the fanatics:[11123] Fouquier-Tinville, Hermann, Dumas, Payan, Coffinhal, Fleuriot-Lescot, and, lower down on the scale, apostate priests, renegade nobles, disappointed artists, infatuated studio-apprentices, journeymen scarcely able to write their names, shoemakers, joiners, carpenters, tailors, barbers, former lackeys, an idiot like Ganney, a deaf man like Leroy-Dix-Août; their names and professions indicate all that is necessary to be told: these men are licensed and paid murderers. The Jurymen themselves are allowed eighteen francs a day, so that they may attend to their business more leisurely. This business consists in condemning without proof, without any pleadings, and scarcely any examination, in a hurry, in batches, whoever the Committee of Public Safety might send to them, even the most confirmed Montagnards: Danton, who contrived the tribunal, will soon discover this.—it is through these two government institutions that the Committee of Public Safety keeps every head under the cleaver and each head, to avoid being struck off, bows down,[11124] in the provinces as well as in Paris.
This has happened when the existing local hierarchy was replaced by new authorities making the omnipotent will of the Committee present everywhere. Directly or indirectly, "for all government measures or measures of public safety, all that relates to persons and the general and internal police, all constituted bodies and all public functionaries, are placed under its inspection."[11125] You may imagine how the risk of being guillotined weighed upon them.
To suppress in advance any tendency to administrative inertia, it has had withdrawn from the too powerful, too much respected, department governments, "too inclined to federalism," their departmental dominance and their "political influence."[11126] It reduces these to the levying of taxes and the supervision of roads and canals; it purges them out through its agents; it even purges out the governments of municipalities and districts. To suppress beforehand all probability of popular opposition, it has had the sessions of the sections reduced to two per week; it installs in these sections, for about forty sous a day, a majority of sans-culottes; it orders the suspension "until further directives" of all municipal elections.[11127]
Finally, to have full control on the spot, it appoints its own men, first, the commissioners and the representatives on missions, a sort of temporary corps of directors sent into each department with unlimited powers;[11128] next, a body of national agents, a sort of permanent body of sub-delegates, through whom in each district and municipality it replaces the procureurs-syndics.[11129] To this army of functionaries is added in each town, bourg or large village, a revolutionary committee, paid three francs a day per member, charged with the application of its decrees, and required to make reports thereon. Never before was such a vast and closely woven network cast from above to envelope and keep captive twenty-six million people. Such is the real constitution which the Jacobins substitute for the constitution they have prepared for show. In the arsenal of the monarchy which they destroyed they took the most despotic institutions—centralization, Royal Council, lieutenants of police, special tribunals, intendants and sub-delegates; they disinterred the antique Roman law of lèse-majesty, refurbished old blades which civilization had dulled, aiming them at every throat and now wielded at random against liberties, property and lives. It is called the "revolutionary government;" according to official statements it is to last until peace is secured; in the minds of genuine Jacobins it must continue until all the French have been regenerated in accordance with the formula.
1101 ([return])
[ Titus Flavious Clemens, (Greek writer born in Athens around 150 and dead in Cappadoce in 250) He lived in Alexandria. (SR).]
1102 ([return])
[ The words of Marat.]
1103 ([return])
[ After the Constitution is completed, said Legendre, in the Jacobin club, we will make the federalists dance.]
1104 ([return])
[ Archives Nationales, F.I.C.. 56, (Circular of Gohier, Minister of Justice, to the French people, July 6, 1793). "Certain persons are disposed to pervert the events of May 31 and June 2, by atrocious exaggerations and the grossest fables, and prevent the fortunate results they present from being seen. They are absolutely determined to see nothing but violations of the liberty of the people's representatives in a step which was specially designed to hasten on the Constitutional Act on which the liberty of all is established. Of what consequence is it who are the authors of the Constitution presented to you? What does it matter whether it issues from a mountain amidst lightning and the rolling thunder, like the Tables of the Law given to the Hebrews, or whether it comes, like the laws given to the early Romans, inspired in the tranquil asylum of a divinity jealous of his religious surroundings? Is this constitution worthy of a free people? That is the only question which citizens who wear the livery of no party need examine!">[
1105 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXVIII., 177. (report by Hérault Séchelles, June 10, 1793). Ibid, XXXI., 400. (Text of constitution submitted to discussion June 11th, and passed June 24th.)]
1106 ([return])
[ De Sybel, II., 331. (According to the facsimile published in the Quarterly Review). "Hérault says that he and four of his colleagues are ordered to furnish the draft of a constitution by Monday.">[
1107 ([return])
[ Report by Hérault-Séchelles. (Buchez et Roux, XXVIII. 178.)]
1108 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXXI, 400. (Articles of the Declaration of Rights, 1, 7, 9, 11, 27, 31, 35)]
1109 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXVIII., 178. Report by Hérault-Séchelles. "Each of us had the same desire, that of attaining to the greatest democratic result. The sovereignty of the people and the dignity of man were constantly in our minds... A secret sentiment tells us that our work is perhaps the most popular that ever existed.">[
1110 ([return])
[ Archives Nationales, B. II., 23. (Table of votes by the commission appointed to collect the procès-verbaux of the adoption of the constitution, August 20, 1793.)—Number of primary assemblies sending in their procès-verbaux, 6,589 (516 cantons have not yet sent theirs in).—Number of voters on call, 1,795,908; Yes, 1,784,377; Noes, 11,531.—Number of primary assemblies voting Yes unanimously, not on call of names, 297.—At Paris, 40,990 voters, at Troyes, 2,491, at Limoges, 2,137.—Cf. For details and motives of abstention, Sauzay IV. pp. 157-161. Albert Babeau, II, pp. 83 and 84. Moniteur, XVII., 375 (speech by the representative Desvars).]
1111 ([return])
[ Ibid., Moniteur, XVII., 20. (report by Barrère on the convocation of the primary assemblies, June 17, 1793.) Ibid., 102 (Report of Cambon, July 11). "It is now a fortnight since you demanded a Constitution. Very well, here it is.... Respect for persons and property is amply secured in it. Yes, more definitely than in any other constitution. Does it provide for its own revision? Yes, for in six weeks, we can convoke the primary assemblies and express our desire for the reform that may appear necessary.—Will the popular wish be respected? Yes, the people then will make definitive laws.">[
1112 ([return])
[ Guillon de Montléon, I., 282, 309.—Buchez et Roux, XXVIII, 356, 357 (Journal de Lyon Nos. 223 and 224.) "The acceptance of the Constitution was neither entire nor very sincere; people took credit to themselves for accepting a vicious and sketchy production." Meillan, "Mémoires," 120. (In July he leaves Caen for Quimper). "Although we were assured that we should pass only through Maratist towns, we had the satisfaction of finding nearly all the inhabitants regarding Marat with horror. They had indeed accepted the Constitution offered by the Committee of Public Safety, but solely to end the matter and on conditions which would speak well for them; for, everywhere the renewal of the Convention was exacted and the punishment of assaults made on it." This desire, and others analogous to it, are given in the procès-verbaux of many of the primary assemblies (Archives Nationales, B. II., 23); for example, in those of the thirteen cantons of Ain. A demand is made, furthermore, for the reintegration of the Twenty-two, the abolition of the revolutionary tribunal, the suppression of absolute proconsulates, the organization of a department guard for securing the future of the Convention, the discharge of the revolutionary army, etc.]
1113 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVII., 20. Report of Barère: "The Constitutional act is going to draw the line between republicans and royalists.">[
1114 ([return])
[ Archives Nationales, F.I.C., 54. (Circular of the Minister, Gohier, July 6, 1793.) "It is to-day that, summoned to the alter of the country, those who desire the Republic will be known by name, and those who do not desire it, whether they speak or keep silent, will be equally known.">[
1115 ([return])
[ Sauzay, IV., 160, 161. (Article by the Vidette.) Consequently, "all the unconstitutionalists nobles and priests considered it a duty to go the assemblies and joyfully accept a constitution which guaranteed liberty and property to everybody.">[
1116 ([return])
[ "Journal des Débats de la Société des Jacobins," No. For July 27, 1793 (correspondence, No. 122).]
1117 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVII., 156, 163.]
1118 ([return])
[ Sauzay, IV., 158: "The motives for judgments were thus stated by judges themselves.">[
1119 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVII., 40, 48, 72, 140, 175, 194, 263. (Cf. Speeches by Chaumette, July 14, and Report by Gossoin, August 9).—Archives Nationales, B. II., 23. Negative votes in Ardèche 5, in Aude 5, Moselle 5, Saône-et-Loire 5, Côte-d'Or 4, Creuse 4, Haut-Rhin 4, Gers 4, Haute-Garonne 3, Aube 2, Bouches-du-Rhône 2, Cantal 2, Basses-Alpes 1, Haute-Marne 1, Haute-Vienne 1, Var 0, Seine 0.—The details and circumstances of voting are curious. In the department of Aube, at Troyes, the second section in agreement with the third, excluded "suspects" from the vote. At Paris, the section "Gardes Française," Fourcroy president, announces 1,714 voters, of which 1,678 are citizens and 36 citoyennes. In the "Mont Blanc" section, the secretary signs as follows: Trone segretaire general de la semblé.]
1120 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVII., 375. (Session of the convention, August 11, 1793). Chabot: "I demand a law requiring every man who does not appear at a primary meeting to give good reason for his absence; also, that any man who has not favored the Constitution, be declared ineligible to all constitutional franchises." Ibid., 50. (Meeting of the Commune, July 4th). Leonard Bourdon demands, in the name of his section, the Gravilliers, a register on which to inscribe those who accept the Constitution, "in order that those who do not vote for it may be known."—Souzay, IV. 159. M. Boillon, of Belleherbe, is arrested "for being present at the primary assembly of the canton of Vaucluse, and when called upon to accept the Constitutional act, leaving without voting.">[
1121 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVII., 11. (Instructions on the mode of accepting the Constitution).—Sauzay IV., 158.—Moniteur, XVII., 302. (Speech by Garat, August 2.) "I have dispatched commissioners to push the Constitutional Act through the primary assemblies."—Durand- Maillane. 150. "The envoys of the departments were taken from the sans-culotterie then in fashion, because they ruled in the Convention.">[
1122 ([return])
[ Sauzay, IV., 158.]
1123 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVII., 363. (Report of Gossuin to the Convention, August 9). "There are primary assemblies which have extended their deliberations beyond the acceptance of the Constitution. This acceptance being almost unanimous, all other objects form matter for petitions to be entrusted to competent committees."—Ibid., 333. (Speech of Delacroix). "The anti-revolutionary delegates sent by the conspirators we had in the Convention must be punished. (August 6.).]
1124 ([return])
[ Moniteur, ibid., 333. Speech and motions of Bazire, August 8.—XIX., 116. Report of Vouland, January 2, 1794. The pay of Maillard and his acolytes amounted to twenty-two thousand livres.—XVIII., 324. (Session of August 5. Speeches of Gossuin, Thibault and Lacroix.)—Ibid., 90. (Session of Germinal 8, year III.) Speech by Bourdon de l'Oise: "We have been obliged to pick men out of the envoys in order to find those disposed for rigorous measures.">[
1125 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVII., 330. Ordinance of the Commune, August 6.]
1126 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVII., 332. (Session of the Convention, August 6.)—Cf. the "Diurnal" of Beaulieu, August 6. Beaulieu mentions several deputations and motions of the same order, and states the alarm of the "Mountain."—Durand-Maillane, "Mémoires," 151. "Among the envoys from the departments were sensible men who, far from approving of all the steps taken by their brethren, entertained and manifested very contrary sentiments. These were molested and imprisoned."—"Archives des Affaires étrangères," vol. 1411. (Report of the agents of August 10 and 11.) The department commissioners... seemed to us in the best disposition. There are some intriguers among them, however; we are following up some of them, and striving by fraternizing with them to prevent them from being seduced or led away by the perfidious suggestions of certain scoundrels, the friends of federalism, amongst them.... A few patriotic commissioners have already denounced several of their brethren accused of loving royalty and federalism.">[
1127 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXVIII., 408.]
1128 ([return])
[ Moniteur., XVII., 330. (Act passed by the Commune, August 6.)]
1129 ([return])
[ Archives des Affaires étrangères, vol. 1411. (Reports of agents, Aug. 10 and 11). "Citizens are, to-day, eager to see who shall have a commissioner at his table: who shall treat him the best. .. the Commissioners of the primary assemblies come and fraternise with them in the Jacobin club. They adopt their maxims, and are carried away by the energy of the good and true republican sans-culottes in the clubs.">[
1130 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVII., 307, 308. (Report of Couthon to the Convention, Aug. 2.) "You would wound, you would outrage these Republicans, were you to allow the performance before them of an infinity of pieces filled with insulting allusions to liberty.">[
1131 ([return])
[ Ibid. 124. (Session of Aug. 5.)]
1132 ([return])
[ Ibid., 314; (Letter of Lhuillier, Aug. 4.)—322, Session of the Commune, Aug. 4th; 332, (Session of the Convention, Aug. 6).—Buchez et Roux, XXVIII., 409. (Meeting of the Jacobin Club, Aug. 5th).]
1133 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, 411 (Article in the Journal de la Montagne.)]
1134 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVII., 348.]
1135 ([return])
[ "Le Féderation" was in 1790 "the Association of the National Guards." (SR).]
1136 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XVIII., 415 and following pages.]
1137 ([return])
[ Ibid., 352.—Cf. Beaulieu, "Diurnal," Aug. 9.]
1138 ([return])
[ On the mechanical character of the festivals of the Revolution read the programme of "The civic fete in honor of Valor and Morals," ordered by Fouché at Nevers, on the 1st day of the 1st decade of the 2nd month of the year II. (De Martel, "Etude sur Fouché," 202); also, the programme of the "Fete de l'Etre Supréme," at Sceaux, organized by the patriot Palloy, Presidial 20, year II. (Dauban, Paris en 1794, p.187).]
1139 ([return])
[ It cost one million two hundred thousand francs, besides the traveling expenses of eight thousand delegates.]
1140 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXVIII., 439, and following pages. Procès verbal of he National Festival of the 10th of August.—Dauban "La Demagogie en 1791." (Extract from the Republican Ritual.)]
1141 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVII., 366. (Session of Aug. 11. Speech by Lacroix and decree in conformity therewith.)]
1142 ([return])
[ Ibid., 374. "Remember that you are accountable to the nation and the universe for this sacred Ark. Remember that it is your duty to die rather than suffer a sacrilegious hand.....">[
1143 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXVIII., 358. It is evident from the context of the speech that Robespierre and the Jacobins were desirous of maintaining the Convention because they foresaw Girondist elections.]
1144 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVII., 382. (Session of Aug. 12. Speech by Lacroix).]
1145 ([return])
[ Ibid., 387.—Cf. Ibid., 410, session of August 16. The delegates return there to insist on a levy, en masse, the levy of the first class not appearing sufficient to them. (levy means mobilization of all men)—Buchez et Roux, XXVIII., 464. Delegate Royer, Curé of Chalons-sur-Saone, demands that the aristocrats "chained together in sixes" be put in the front rank in battle "to avoid the risks of sauve qui peut.">[
1146 ([return])
[ Decrees of August 14 and 16.]
1147 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVII., 375.]
1148 ([return])
[ Riouffe, "Mémoires," 19: "An entire generation, the real disciples of Jean-Jacques, Voltaire and Diderot, could be, and was annihilated, to a large extent under the pretext of federalism.">[
1149 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVII., 102. (Speech by Cambon, July 11, 1793). Archives Nationales, AF. II., 46. (Speech of General Wimpffen to the "Société des amis de la Liberté et de l'Egalité," in session at Cherbourg, June 25, 1793). "Sixty-four departments have already revoked the powers conferred on their representatives." Meillan, "Mémoires," 72: "The archives of Bordeaux once contained the acts passed by seventy-two departments, all of which adhered to measures nearly the same as those indicted in our documents.">[
1150 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XVIII., 148.—Meillan, 70, 71.—Guillon de Montléon, I., 300 (on Lyons) and I., 280 (on Bordeaux). Archives Nationales, AF II., 46. (Deliberations of the Nantes section July 5).—Letter of Merlin and Gillet, representatives on mission, Lorient, June 12. Dissatisfaction at the outrages of May 31 and June 2, was so manifest that the representatives on mission Merline, Gillet, Savestre, and Cagaignac print on the 14th of June a resolution authorising one of their body to go to the Convention and protest "in their name" against the weakness shown by it and against the ursurpations of the Paris commune.—Sauzay, IV., 260. At Besançon, in a general assembly of all the administrative, judicial and municipal bodies of the department joined to the commissioners of the section, protest "unanimously" on the 15th of June.]
1151 ([return])
[ Archives Nationales, Ibid.(Letter of Romme and Prieur, Caen, June 10th, to the committee of Public Safety). The insurgents are so evidently in the right that Romme and Prieur approve of their own arrest. "Citizens, our colleagues, this arrest may be of great importance, serve the cause of liberty, maintain the unity of the republic and revive confidence if, as we hasten to demand it of you, you confirm it by a decree which declares us hostages.... We have noticed that among the people of Caen, there is a love of liberty, as well as of justice and docility.">[
1152 ([return])
[ Archives Nationales, AF. II., 46. (Printed July 5). Result of the deliberations of the Nantes sections. The act is signed by the three administrative bodies of Nantes, by the district rulers of Clisson, Anceries and Machecoul, who had fled to Nantes, and by both the deputies of the districts of Paimboeuf and Chateaubriand, in all, eighty-six signatures.]
1153 ([return])
[ Archives Nationales, ibid., (letter of General Wimpffen to the "Societé des Amis de l'Egalité et de la Liberté" in session at Cherbourg, June 25, 1793).—Mortimer-Ternaux, VIII., 126.—On the opinion of the departments cf. Paul Thibaud ("Etudes sur l'histoire de Grenoble et du Department de l'Isére").—Louis Guibert ("Le Parti Girondin dans le Haute Vienne").—Jarrin, ("Bourg et Bellay pendant la Révolution").]
1154 ([return])
[ Albert Babeau, II., 83. (Pamphlet by the curé of Cleray). "Every primary assembly that accepts the Constitution strikes the factions a blow on the head with the club of Hercules.">[
1155 ([return])
[ Cf. "The Revolution," Vol. II. Ch. XI.]
1156 ([return])
[ Buzot.—Archives Nationales, AF. II., 157. Reports by Baudot and Ysabeau to the Convention. The 19th of Aug. At the Hotel de Ville of Bordeaux, they eulogize the 21st of January: "There was then a roar as frightful as it was general. A city official coolly replied to us: What would you have? To oppose anarchy we have been forced to join the aristocrats, and they rule." Another says ironically to Ysabeau: "We did not anticipate that,—they are our tribunes.">[
1157 ([return])
[ Jarrin, "Bourg et Belley pendant la Révolution" ("Annales de la Societé d'Emulation de l'Ain," 1878, Nos. For January, February and March, p. 16).]
1158 ([return])
[ Louvet, 103, 108.—Guillon de Montléon, I., 305 and following pages.—Buchez et Roux, XXVIII., 151. (Report of the delegates of the district of Andelys). "One of members observed that there would be a good deal of trouble in raising an armed force of one thousand men."—An administrator (a commissioner of Calvados) replied: "We shall have all the aristocrats on our side." The principal military leaders at Caen and at Lyons, Wimpffen, Précy, Puisaye, are Feuillants and form only a provisional alliance with the Girondists properly so called, Hence constant contentions and reciprocal mistrust. Birotteau and Chapet leave Lyons because they do not find the spirit of the place sufficiently republican.]
1159 ([return])
[ Louvet, 124, 129.—Buchez et Roux, XXVII, 360. (Notice by General Wimpffen), July 7.—Puisaye, "Mémoires" and "L'Insurrection Normande." by et Vaultier et Mancel.]
1160 ([return])
[ Mortimer-Ternaux, VIII., 471. Letter of Barbaroux, Caen, June 18.—Ibid., 133. Letter of Madame Roland to Buzot, July 7. "You are not the one to march at the head of battalions (departmental). It would have the appearance of gratifying personal vengeance.">[
1161 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXVIII., 153. (Deliberations of the constituted authorities of Marseilles, June 7.)]
1162 ([return])
[ Guillon de Montléon, II., 40. The contrast between the two parties is well shown in the following extract from the letter of a citizen of Lyons to Kellerman's soldiers. "They tell you that we want to destroy the unity of the republic, while they themselves abandon the frontiers to the enemy in order to come here and cut their brethren's throats.">[
1163 ([return])
[ Guillon de Montléon, I., 288.—Marcelin Boudet, "Les Conventionnels d'Auvergne," p. 181.—Louvet, 193.—Moniteur, XVII., 101. (Speech of Cambon, July 11). "We have preferred to expose these funds (one hundred and five millions destined for the army) to being intercepted, rather than to retard this dispatch. The first thing the Committee of Public Safety have had to care for was to save the republic and make the administrations fully responsible for it. They were fully aware of this, and accordingly have allowed the circulation of these funds... They have been forced, through the wise management of the Committee, to contribute themselves to the safety of the republic.">[
1164 ([return])
[ Archives Nationales, Letter of Robert Lindet, June 16, AF. II., 43. The correspondence of Lindet, which is very interesting, well shows the sentiments of the Lyonnese and the policy of the "Mountain." "However agitated Lyons may be, order prevails; nobody wants either king or tyrant; all use the same language: the words republic, union, are in everybody's mouth." (Eight letters.) He always gives the same advice to the Committee of Public Safety: "Publish a constitution, publish the motives of the bills of arrest," which are indispensable to rally everybody to the Convention, (June 15).]
1165 ([return])
[ Guillon de Montléon, I., 309 (July 24).]
1166 ([return])
[ Sauzay, IV., 268.—Paul Thibaud, 50.—Marcelin Boudet, 185.—Archives Nationales AF. II., 46. Extract from the registers of the Council of the department of Loire-Inferieure, July 14. The department protests that its decree of July 5 was not "a rupture with the Convention, an open rebellion against the laws of the State, an idea very remote from the sentiments and intentions of the citizens present." Now, "the plan of a Constitution is offered to the acceptance of the sovereign. This fortunate circumstance should bring people to one mind, and, with hope thus renewed, let us at once seize on the means of salvation thus presented to us."—Moniteur, XVII., 102. (Speech of Cambon, July 11.)]
1167 ([return])
[ Louvet, 119, 128, 150, 193.—Meillan, 130, 141. (On the disposition and sentiments of the provinces and of the public in general, the reader will find ample and authentic details in the narratives of the fugitives who scattered themselves in all directions, and especially those of Louvet, Meillan, Dulaure, and Vaublanc.) Cf. the "Mémoires de Hua" and "Un Séjour en France in 1792 and 1795."—Mallet-du-Pan already states this disposition before 1789 (MS. Journal). "June, 1785: The French live simply in a crowd; they must all cling together. On the promenades they huddle together and jostle each other in one alley; the same when there is more space." "Aug., 1787, (after the first riots): I have remarked in general more curiosity than excitement in the multitude.... One can judge, at this moment, the national character; a good deal of bravado and nonsense; neither reason, rule nor method; rebellious in crowds, and not a soul that does not tremble in the presence of a corporal.">[
1168 ([return])
[ Meillan, 143.—Mortimer-Ternaux, VIII., 203. (Session of August 10).—Mallet-du-Pan, "Mémoires," II., 9.]
1169 ([return])
[ Ernest Daudet, "His. des Conspirations royalistes dans le midi." (Books II. And III.)]
1170 ([return])
[ Guillon de Montléon, I., 313. (Address of a Lyonais to the patriot soldiers under Kellerman.)]
1171 ([return])
[ Mortimer-Ternaux, VIII., 222.—The insurrection of Toulon, Girondist at the start, dates July 1st.—Letter of the new administrators of Toulon to the Convention. "W desire the Republic, one and indivisible; there is no sign of rebellion with us... Representatives Barras and Fréron lie shamefully in depicting us as anti-revolutionaries, on good terms with the English and the families of Vendée."—The Toulon administrators continue furnishing the Italian army with supplies. July 19, an English boat, sent to parley, had to lower the white flag and hoist the tri-color flag. The entry of the English into Toulon did not take place before the 29th of August.]
1172 ([return])
[ Guillon de Montléon, II., 67. (Letter of the Lyonnese to the representatives of the people, Sep. 20): "The people of Lyons have constantly respected the laws, and if, as in some departments, that of Rhone-et-Loire was for a moment mistaken in the events of May 31, they hastened, as soon as they believed that the Convention was not oppressed, to recognize and execute its decrees. Every day, now that these reach it, they are published and observed within its walls.">[
1173 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVII., 269. (Session of July 28). (Letter of the administrators of the department of Rhone-et-Loire to the Convention, Lyons, July 24). "We present to the Convention our individual recantation and declaration; in conforming to the law we are entitled to its protection. We petition the court to decide on our declaration, and to repeal the acts which relate to us or make an exception in our favor... We have always professed ourselves to be true republicans.">[
1174 ([return])
[ Guillon de Montléon, I., 309, 311, 315, 335.—Mortimer-Ternaux, VIII., 197.]
1175 ([return])
[ Mortimer-Ternaux, VIII., 141.]
1176 ([return])
[ Mallet du Pan, I., 379 and following pages; I., 408; II., 10.]
1177 ([return])
[ Entry of the Republican troops into Lyons, October 9th, into Toulon, December 19th.—Bordeaux had submitted on the 2nd of August. Exasperated by the decree of the 6th which proscribed all the abettors of the insurrection, the city drives out, on the 19th, the representatives Baudot and Ysabeau. It submits again on the 19th of September. But so great is the indignation of the citizens, Tallien and his three colleagues dare not enter before the 16th of October. (Mortimer-Ternaux, VIII., 197 and following pages.)]
1178 ([return])
[ Seventy thousand men were required to reduce Lyons, (Guillon de Montléon, II., 226) and sixty thousand men to reduce Toulon.]
1179 ([return])
[ Archives des Affaires étrangères, vol. CCCXXIX. (Letter of Chépy, political agent, Grenoble, July 26, 1793). "I say it unhesitatingly, I had rather reduce Lyons than save Valenciennes.">[
1180 ([return])
[ Ibid., vol. CCCXXIX. (Letter of Chépy, Grenoble, August 24, 1793): "The Piedmontese are masters of Cluse. A large body of mountaineers have joined them. At Annecy the women have cut down the liberty pole and burnt the archives of the club and commune. At Chambéry, the people wanted to do the same, but they forced the sick in the hospitals to take arms and thus kept them down.">[
1181 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVIII, 474. (Report of Billaud-Varennes, October 18, 1793). "The combined efforts of all the powers of Europe have not compromised liberty and the country so much as the federalist factions; the assassin the most to be dreaded is the one that lives in the house.">[
1182 ([return])
[ The convention purposely reinstates incendiaries and assassins. (Moniteur, XVIII., 483. Session of Breumaire 28, year II.): XVII., 176. (Session of July 19, 1793). Rehabilitation of Bordier and Jourdain, hung in August, 1789. Cancelling of the proceedings begun against the authors of the massacre of Melun (September, 1792) and release of the accused.—Cf. Albert Babeau, (I., 277.) Rehabilitation, with indemnities distributed in Messidor, year II, to their relatives.—"Archives des Affaires étrangères," vol. 331. (Letter of Chépy, Grenoble, Frimaire 8, year II). "The criminal court and jury of the department have just risen to the height of the situation; they have acquitted the castle-burners.">[
1183 ([return])
[ Mortimer-Ternaux, VIII., 593. (Deputation of twenty-four sections sent from Bordeaux to the Convention, August 30).—Buchez et Roux, XXVIII., 494. (Report of the representatives on mission in Bouches-du-Rhône, September 2nd).—Ibid., XXX., 386. (Letter of Rousin, commandant of the revolutionary army at Lyons. "A population of one hundred twenty thousand souls..... There are not amongst all these, one thousand five hundred patriots, even one thousand five hundred persons that one could spare."—Guillon de Montléon, I., 355, 374. (Signatures of twenty thousand Lyonnese of all classes, August 17th).]
1184 ([return])
[ Guillon de Montléon, I., 394. (Letter of Dubois-Crancé to the Lyonnese, August 19th.)]
1185 ([return])
[ Mortimer-Ternaux, VIII., 198. (Decree of Aug. 6.)—Buchez et Roux, XXVIII. 297, (Decree of July 12.).—Guillon de Montléon, I., 342. Summons of Dubois-Crancé, Aug. 8.)]
1186 ([return])
[ Meillan, 142.).—"Archives des Affaires Etrangéres," vol. CCCXXXII. (Letter of Desgranges, Bordeaux, Brumaire 8, year II.): "The execution of Mayor Saige, who was much loved by the people for his benefactions, caused much sorrow: but no guilty murmur was heard.">[
1187 ([return])
[ Archives Nationales, AF. II., 46. (Letter of Julien to the Committee of Public Safety Messidor 11, year II). "Some time ago a solemn silence prevailed at the sessions of the military commission, the people's response to the death-sentences against conspirators; the same silence attended them to the scaffold; the whole commune seemed to sob in secret at their fate.">[
1188 ([return])
[ Berryat Saint-Prix, "La Justice Révolutionaire," pp. 277-299.—Archives Nationales, AF. II., 46. (Registers of the Com. Of Surveillance, Bordeaux). The number of prisoners between Prairial 21 and 28, varies from 1504 to 1529. Number of the guillotined, 882. (Memoirs of Sénart).]
1189 ([return])
[ Archives Nationales, AF. II., 46. Letter of Julien, Messidor 12, year II. "A good deal has been stolen here; the mayor, now in prison, is informed of considerable losses. The former Committee of surveillance came under serious suspicion; many people who were outlawed only escaped by paying: it is a fact that... Of a number of those who have thus purchased their lives there are some who did not deserve to die and who, nevertheless, were threatened with death."—Buchez et Roux, XXXII., 428. (Extracts from the Memoirs of Sénart). "The president of the military commission was a man named Lacombe, already banished from the city on account of a judgment against him for robbery. The other individuals employed by Tallien comprised a lot of valets, bankrupts and sharpers.">[
1190 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXVIII., 493. (Speech by Danton, August 31, and decree in conformity therewith by the Convention).]
1191 ([return])
[ Mallet-Dupan, II., 17. "Thousands of traders in Marseilles and Bordeaux, here the respectable Gradis and there the Tarteron, have been assassinated and their goods sold. I have seen the thirty-second list only of the Marseilles emigres, whose property has been confiscated.... There are twelve thousand of them and the lists are not yet complete." (Feb. 1, 1794.)—Anne Plumptre.2A Narrative of Three years' Residence in France, from 1802 to 1805." "During this period the streets of Marseilles were almost those of a deserted town. One could go from one end of the town to the other without meeting any one he could call an inhabitant. The great terrorists, of whom scarcely one was a Marseillaise, the soldiers and roughs as they called themselves, were almost the only persons encountered. The latter, to the number of fifty or sixty, in jackets with leather straps, fell upon all whom they did not like, and especially on anybody with a clean shirt and white cravat. Many persons on the "Cours" were thus whipped to death. No women went out-doors without a basket, while every man wore a jacket, without which they were taken for aristocrats." (II., 94.)]
1192 ([return])
[ "Mémoires de Fréron." (Collection Barrière and Berville). Letters of Fréron to Moise Bayle, Brumaire 23, Pluviose 5 and 11, Novose 16, II, published by Moise Bayle, also details furnished by Huard, pp. 350-365.—Archives Nationales, AF. II., 144. (Order of representatives Fréron, Barras, Salicetti and Richard, Novose 17, year II.)]
1193 ([return])
[ Mallet-Dupan, II., 17.—Guillon de Montléon, II., 259.]
1194 ([return])
[ Ibid., II., 281. (Decree of the Convention, Oct. 12); II. 312. (Orders of Couthon and his colleagues, Oct. 25); II., 366-372 (Instructions of the temporary commission, Brumaire 26).]
1195 ([return])
[ Ibid. III., 153-156. Letter of Laporte to Couthon, April 13, 1794.]
1196 ([return])
[ The contemporary French Encyclopedia "QUID" ed. Lafont, 1996 states on page 755 that according to Louis Marie Prudhomme there were 31 000 victims at Lyons. (SR.)]
1197 ([return])
[ Ibid. II. 135-137. (Resolutions of the Revolutionary Commission, Germinal 17.) and Letters of Cadillot to Robespierre, Floréal, year II). III., 63.]
1198 ([return])
[ Guillon de Montléon, II., 399. (Letter of Perrotin, member of the temporary commission to the revolutionary committee of Moulin.) "The work before the new commission may be considered as an Organization of the Septembrisade; the process will be the same but legalized by an act passed.">[
1199 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXIX., 192. (Decree of October 12).]
11100 ([return])
[ Ibid., XXX., 457. (Decree of November 23).]
11101 ([return])
[ "Mémoires de Fréron." (Letter of Fréron, Nivose 6).—Guillon de Montléon, II., 391.]
11102 ([return])
[ Decrees of October 12 and December 24.—Archives Nationales, AF. II., 44. The representatives on mission wanted to do the same thing with Marseilles. (Orders of Fréron, Barras, Salicetti, and Ricard, Nivôse 17, year II.) "The name of Marseilles, still borne by this criminal city, shall be changed. The National Convention shall be requested to give it another name. Meanwhile it shall remain nameless and be thus known." In effect, in several subsequent documents, Marseilles is called the nameless commune.]
11103 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXVIII., 204. (Session of June 24: "Strong expressions of dissent are heard on the right." Legendre, "I demand that the first rebel, the first man there (pointing to the "Right" party) who interrupts the speaker, be sent to the Abbaye." Couhey, indeed, was sent to the Abbaye for applauding a Federalist speech.—Cf. on these three months.—Mortimer-Ternaux, vol. VIII.]
11104 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXIX., 175.—Dauban: "La Démagogie à Paris en 1793," 436 (Narrative by Dulaure, an eye-witness).]
11105 ([return])
[ There were really only twenty-two brought before the revolutionary tribunal.]
11106 ([return])
[ Dauban, XXVI., p. 440. (Narrative of Blanqui, one of the seventy-three.)]
11107 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux. XXIX., 178, 179. Osselin: "I demand the decree of accusation against them all."—Amar: "The apparently negative conduct of the minority of the Convention since the 2nd of June, was a new plot devised by Barbaroux." Robespierre: "If there are other criminals among those you have placed under arrest the Committee of General Security will present to you the nomenclature of them and you will always be at liberty to strike.">[
11108 ([return])
[ Ibid., XXIX., 432, 437, 447.—Report by Amar. (this report served as the bill of indictment against them, "cowardly satellites of royal despotism, vile agents of foreign tyrants."—Wallon, II., 407, 409. (Letter of Fouquier-Tinville to the convention). "After the special debates, will not each of the accused demand a general prosecution? The trial, accordingly, will be interminable. Besides, one may ask why should there be witnesses? The convention, all France, accuses those on trial. The evidence of their crimes is plain; everybody is convinced of their guilt.... It is the Convention which must remove all formalities that interfere with the course pursued by the tribunal."—Moniteur, XVII., (Session of October 28), 291. The decree provoked by a petition of Jacobins, is passed on motion of Osselin, aggravated by Robespierre.]
11109 ([return])
[ Louvet, "Mémoires," 321. (List of the Girondists who perished or who were proscribed. Twenty-four fugitives survived.)]
11110 ([return])
[ Mortimer-Ternaux, VIII., 395, 416, 435. The terror and disgust of the majority is seen in the small number of voters. Their abstention from voting is the more significant in relation to the election of the dictators. The members of the Committee of Public Safety, elected on the 16th of July, obtain from one hundred to one hundred and ninety-two votes. The members of the Committee of Security obtain from twenty-two to one hundred and thirteen votes. The members of the same committee, renewed on the 11th of September, obtain from fifty-two to one hundred and eight votes. The judges of the revolutionary tribunal, completed on the 3rd of August, obtain from forty-seven to sixty-five votes.—Meillan, 85. (In relation to the institution of the revolutionary government, on motion of Bazire, Aug. 28). "Sixty or eighty deputies passed this decree... it was preceded by another passed by a plurality of thirty against ten. .. For two months the session the best attended, contains but one hundred deputies. The Montagnards overran the departments to deceive or intimidate the people. The rest, discouraged, keep away from the meetings or take no part in the proceedings.">[
11111 ([return])
[ The meaning and motives of this declaration are clearly indicated in Bazire's speech. "Since the adoption of the Constitution," he says, "Feuillantism has raised its head; a struggle has arisen between energetic and moderate patriots. At the end of the Constituent Assembly, the Feuillants possessed themselves of the words law, order, public, peace, security, to enchain the zeal of the friends of freedom; the same manoeuvres are practiced to-day. You must shatter the weapon in your enemies' hands, which they use against you."—Durand-Maillane, 154. "The simple execution of constitutional laws," said Bazire, "made for peaceable times, would be impotent among the conspiracies that surround you."—Meillan, 108.]
11112 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVIII, 106. (Report of Saint-Just on the organization of the revolutionary government, October 10th, and the decree in conformity therewith.) Ibid., 473. (Report of Billaud-Varennes on a mode of provisional and revolutionary government, Nov. 18th, and decree in conformity therewith.)—Ib., 479 (session of Nov. 22nd, 1793,.—Speech of Hébrard, spokesman of a deputation from Cantal). "A central committee of surveillance, a revolutionary army, has been established in our department. Aristocrats, suspects, the doubtful, moderates, egoists, all gentlemen without distinguishing those who have done nothing for the revolution from those who have acted against it, await in retirement the ulterior measures required by the interests of the Republic. I have said without distinction of the indifferent from the suspects; for we hold to these words of Solon's: 'He who is not with us is against us.'">[
11113 ([return])
[ The trousers used in pre-Revolutionary France by the nobility was called culottes, they terminated just below the knee where the long cotton or silken stockings would begin. The less affluent used long trousers and no socks and became known as the Sans-culottes which became, as mentioned in vol. II. a nickname for the revolutionary proletariat. (SR.)]
11114 ([return])
[ Moniteur, (Speech by Danton, March 26, 1794.) "In creating revolutionary committees the desire was to establish a species of dictatorship of citizens the most devoted to liberty over those who rendered themselves suspects.">[
11115 ([return])
[ Mallet-Dupan, II., 8. (February, 1794). "At this moment the entire people is disarmed. Not a gun can be found either in town or country. If anything attests the super-natural power which the leaders of the Convention enjoy, it is to see, in one instant, through one act of the will and nobody offering any resistance, or complaining of it, the nation from Perpignan to Lille, deprived of every means of defense against oppression, with a facility still more unprecedented than that which attended the universal arming of the nation in 1789."—"A Residence in France," II., 409. "The National Guard as a regular institution was in great part suppressed after the summer of 1793, those who composed it being gradually disarmed. Guard-mounting was continued, but the citizens performing this service were, with very few exceptions, armed with pikes, and these again were not fully entrusted to them; each man, on quitting his post, gave up his arms more punctually than if he had been bound to do so through capitulation with a victorious enemy.">[
11116 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVIII., 106. (Report by Saint-Just, Oct. 10th).]
11117 ([return])
[ Ibid., 473. (Report of Billaud-Varennes, Nov. 13th).]
11118 ([return])
[ Ibid., XVIII., 591. (Speech by Couthon, December 4th). Ibid., Barère: "Electoral assemblies are monarchical institutions, they attach to royalism, they must be specially avoided in revolutionary times.">[
11119 ([return])
[ Mortimer-Ternaux, VIII., 40. (Decree passed on the proposition of Danton, session of September 13th). The motive alleged by Danton is that "members are still found on the committees whose opinions, at least, approach federalism." Consequently the committees are purified, and particularly the Committee of General Security. Six of its members are stricken off (Sept. 14), and the list sent in by the Committee of Public safety passes without discussion.]
11120 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVIII., 592. (Session of December 4, speech by Robespierre).]
11121 ([return])
[ Miot de Melito, "Mémoires," I., 47.]
11122 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXVIII., 153. Mortimer-Ternaux, VIII., 443. (Decree of September 28th).—Wallon, "Histoire du Tribunal Révolutionaire de Paris," IV., 112.]
11123 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXXIV., 300. (Trial of Fouquier-Tinville and associates). Bill of indictment: "One of these publicly boasted of always having voted death. Others state that they were content to see people to give their judgment; physical inspection alone determined them to vote death. Another said, that when there was no offense committed it was necessary to imagine one. Another is a regular sot and has never sat in judgment but in a state of intoxication. Others came to the bench only to fire their volleys." Etc. (Supporting evidence.)—"Observe, moreover, that judges and juries are bound to kill under penalty of death (Ibid.,30)." Fouquier-Tinville states that on the 22nd of Prairial he took the same step (to resign) with Chatelet, Brochet and Lerry, when they met Robespierre, returning to the National Convention arm-in-arm with Barère. Fouquier adds, that they were treated as aristocrats and anti-revolutionaries, and threatened with death if they refused to remain on their posts." Analogous declarations by Pigeot, Ganne, Girard, Dupley, Foucault, Nollin and Madre. "Sellier adds, that the tribunal having remonstrated against the law of Prairial 22, he was threatened with arrest by Dumas. Had we resigned, he says, Dumas would have guillotined us.]
11124 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XXIV., 12. (Session of Ventôse 29, year III., speech by Baileul). "Terror subdued all minds, suppressed all emotions; it was the force of the government, while such was this government that the numerous inhabitants of a vast territory seemed to have lost the qualities which distinguish man from a domestic animal. They seemed even to have no life except what the government accorded to them. Human personality no longer existed; each individual was simply a machine, going, coming, thinking or not thinking as he was impelled or stimulated by tyranny.">[
11125 ([return])
[ Decree of Frimaire 14, year II., Dec. 4, 1793.]
11126 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVII., 473, 474, 478. (Speech by Billaud-Varennes). "The sword of Damocles must henceforth be brandished over the entire surface." This expression of Billaud sums up the spirit of every new institution.]
11127 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVIII., 275. (Session of Oct. 26. 1793, speech by Barère.) "This is the most revolutionary step you can take." (Applause.)]
11128 ([return])
[ Ibid., 520. (Report of Barère and decree in conformity). "The representatives sent on mission are required to conform strictly to the acts of the Committee of Public Safety. Generals and other agents of the executive power will, under no pretext, obey any special order, that they may refuse to carry out the said acts."—Moniteur, XVIII., 291. (Report by Barère, Oct. 29, 1793.) At this date one hundred and forty representatives are on mission.]
11129 ([return])
[ Archives Nationales, AF. II., 22. (Papers of the 'Committee of Public Safety. Note on the results of the revolutionary government without either date or signature.) "The law of Frimaire 14 created two centers of influence from which action spread, in the sense of the Committee, and which affected the authorities. These two pivots of revolutionary rule outside the Committee were the representatives of the people on missions and the national agents controlling the district committees. The word revolutionary government alone exercised an incalculable magical influence."—Mallet-Dupan, "Mémoires," II., p. 2, and following pages.]
BOOK SECOND. THE JACOBIN PROGRAM.
CHAPTER I. THE JACOBIN PARTY
I. The Doctrine.
Program of the Jacobin party.—Abstract principle and
spontaneous development of the theory.
Nothing is more dangerous than a general idea in narrow and empty minds: as they are empty, it finds no knowledge there to interfere with it; as they are narrow it is not long before it occupies the place entirely. Henceforth they no longer belong to themselves but are mastered by it; it works in them and through them, the man, in the true sense of the word, being possessed. Something which is not himself, a monstrous parasite, a foreign and disproportionate conception, lives within him, developing and giving birth to the evil purposes with which it is pregnant. He did not foresee that he would have them; he did not know what his dogma contained, what venomous and murderous consequences were to issue from it. They issue from it fatally, each in its turn, and under the pressure of circumstances, at first anarchical consequences and now despotic consequences. Having obtained power, the Jacobin brings his fixed idea along with him; whether at the head of the government or in opposition to it, this idea is fruitful, and the all-powerful dogma projects over a new domain the innumerable links of its endless chain.
II. A Communist State.
The Jacobin concept of Society.—The Contrat-Social.—Total
surrender of the Individual to the Community.—Everything
belongs to the State.—Confiscations and Sequestrations.
—Pre-emption and requisition and requisition of produce and
merchandise.—Individuals belong to the State.—Drafts of
persons for Military service.—Drafts of persons for the
Civil service.—The State philanthropist, educator,
theologian, moralist, censor and director of ideas and
intimate feelings.
Let us trace this inward development and go back, along with the Jacobin, to first principles, to the original pact, to the first organization of society. There is but one just and sound society, the one founded on the "contrat-social," and
"the clauses of this contract, fully understood, reduce themselves to one, the total transfer of each individual, with all his rights, to the community,.... each surrendering himself up absolutely, just as he actually stands, he and all his forces, of which the property he possesses forms a part."[2101]
There must be no exception or reservation. Nothing of what he previously was, or had, now belongs to him in his own right; henceforth, what he is, or has, devolves upon him only through delegation. His property and his person now form a portion of the commonwealth. If he is in possession of these, his ownership is at second hand; if he derives any benefit there from, it is as a concession. He is their depository, trustee and administrator, and nothing more.[2102] In other words, with respect to these he is simply a managing director, that is to say a functionary like others, with a precarious appointment and always revocable by the State which has appointed him.
"As nature gives to every man absolute power over the members of his body the social pact gives the social body absolute power over all its members."
The State, as omnipotent sovereign and universal proprietor, exercises at discretion, its boundless rights over persons and things; consequently we, its representatives, take all things and persons into our hands; as they belong to it, so do they belong to us.
We have confiscated the possessions of the clergy, amounting to about four billion livres; we confiscate the property of the emigrés, amounting to three billion livres;[2103] we confiscate the property of the guillotined and deported: all this amounts to some hundreds of millions; later on, the count will be made, because the list remains open and is being daily added to. We will sequestrate the property of "suspects," which gives us the right to use it: here are many hundred millions more; after the war and the banishment of "suspects," we shall seize the property along with its income: here, again, are billions of capital.[2104] Meanwhile we take the property of hospitals and of other benevolent institutions, about eight hundred million livres; we take the property of factories, of endowments, of educational institutions, and of literary and scientific associations: another lot of millions.[2105] We take back the domains rented or surrendered by the State for the past three centuries and more, which gives again about a couple of billions.[2106] We take the possessions of the communes up to the amount of their indebtedness. We have already received as inheritance the ancient domains of the crown, also the later domain of the civil list. More than three-fifths[2107] of the soil thus falls into our hands, which three-fifths are much the best stocked; they comprise almost all the large and fine edifices, châteaux, abbeys, mansions, houses of superintendents and nearly all the royal, episcopal, seigniorial and bourgeois stock of rich and elegant furniture; all plate, libraries, pictures and artistic objects accumulated for centuries.—Remark, again, the seizure of specie and all other articles of gold and silver; in the months alone of November and December, 1793, this swoop puts into our coffers three or four hundred millions,[2108] not assignats, but ringing coin. In short, whatever the form of established capital may be we take all we can get hold of, probably more than three-fourths of it.—There remains the portion which is not fixed capital, that which disappears in use, namely, all that is consumed, all the fruits of the soil, every description of provision, all the products of human art and labor which contribute the maintenance of existence. Through "the right of pre-emption" and through the right of "requisition," "the Republic becomes temporary proprietor of whatever commerce, manufacture and agriculture have produced and added to the soil of France: "all food and merchandise is ours before being owned by their holder. We carry out of his house whatever suits us; we pay him for this with worthless paper; we frequently do not pay him at all. For greater convenience, we seize objects directly and wherever we find them, grain in the farmer's barn, hay in the reaper's shed, cattle in the fold, wine in the vats, hides at the butcher's, leather in the tanneries, soap, tallow, sugar, brandy, cloths, linens and the rest, in stores, depots and ware-houses. We stop vehicles and the horses in the street. We enter the premises of mail or coach contractors and empty their stables. We carry away kitchen utensils to obtain the copper; we turn people out of their rooms to get their beds; we strip them of their coats and shirts; in one day, we make ten thousand individuals in one town go barefoot.[2109]
"When public needs require it," says representative Isoré, "all belongs to the people and nothing to individuals."
By virtue of the same right we dispose of persons as we do of things. We decree the levy en masse and, stranger still, we carry it out, at least in many parts of the country, and we keep it up for months: in Vendée, and in the northern and eastern departments, it is the entire male, able-bodied population, up to fifty years of age, which we drive in herds against the enemy.[2110] We afterwards sign an entire generation on, all young men between eighteen and twenty-five, almost a million of men:[2111] whoever fails to appear is put in irons for ten years; he is regarded as a deserter; his property is confiscated, and his family is punished as well; later he is classed with the emigrants, condemned to death, and his father, mother and progenitors, treated as "suspects," imprisoned and their possessions taken.—To clothe, shoe and equip our recruits, we must have workmen; we summon to head-quarters all gunsmiths, blacksmiths and locksmiths, all the tailors and shoemakers of the district, "foremen, apprentices and boys;"[2112] we imprison those who do not come; we install the rest in squads in public buildings and assign them their tasks; they are forbidden to furnish anything to private individuals. Henceforth, French shoemakers must work only for us, and each must deliver to us, under penalty, so many pairs of shoes per decade.[2113]—But, the civil service is no less important than the military service, and to feed the people is as urgent as it is to defend them. Hence we put "in requisition all who have anything to do with handling, transporting or selling provisions and articles of prime necessity,"[2114] especially combustibles and food—wood-choppers, carters, raftsmen, millers, reapers, threshers, wine-growers, movers, field-hands, "country people" of every kind and degree. Their hands belong to us: we make them bestir themselves and work under the penalty of fine and imprisonment. There shall be no idlers, especially in crop time: we take the entire population of a commune or canton into the fields, comprising "the lazy of both sexes;"[2115] willingly or not, they shall do the harvesting under our eyes, banded together in fields belonging to others as well as in their own, and they shall put the sheaves indiscriminately into the public granary.
But in labor all hangs together, from the initial undertaking to the final result, from the raw material to the most finished production, from the great manufacturer down to the pettiest jobber; grasping the first link of the chain involves grasping the last one. The requisition here again answers the purpose: we apply it to all pursuits; each is bound to continue his own; the manufacturer to manufacture, the trader to trade, even to his own detriment, because, if he works at a loss, the public profits, and every good citizen ought to prefer public profit to his own profit.[2116] In effect, let his office be what it will, he is an employee of the community; therefore, the community may not only prescribe task-work to him, but select his task; it need not consult him in the matter, for he has no right to refuse. Hence it is that we appoint or maintain people in spite of themselves, in the magistracy, in the army and in every other species of employment. In vain may they excuse themselves or try get out of the way; they must remain or become generals, judges, mayors, national agents, town councilors, commissioners of public welfare or administration,[2117] even against their will. Too bad for them if the responsibility is expensive or dangerous, if they have no time for leisure, if they do not feel themselves qualified for it, if the rank or services seems to them to lead to a prison or the guillotine; when they declare that the work is forced labor we reply that they liable to work for the State.—Such is, henceforth, the condition of all Frenchmen, and likewise of all French women. We force mothers to take their daughters to the meetings of popular clubs. We oblige women to parade in companies, and march in procession at republican festivals; we invade the family and select the most beautiful to be draped as antique goddesses, and publicly promenaded on a chariot; we sometimes even designate those among the rich who must wed patriots[2118]: there is no reason why marriage, which is the most important of all services, should not be put in requisition like the others.—Accordingly, we enter families, we carry of the child, we subject him to a civic education. We are schoolmasters, philanthropists, theologians, and moralists. We impose by force our religion and our ritual, our morality and our social customs. We lord it over private lives and consciences; we dictate ideas, we scrutinize and punish secret inclinations, we tax, imprison and guillotine not only the evil-disposed, but again "the indifferent, the moderate and the egoists."[2119] Over and above his visible acts we dictate to the individual his ideas and his deepest feelings; we prescribe to him his affections as well as his beliefs, and, according to a preconceived type, we refashion his intellect, his conscience and his sensibilities.
III. The object of the State is the regeneration of man.
The object of the State is the regeneration of man.—Two
sides to this undertaking.—Restoration of the Natural man.
—Formation of the Social man.—Grandeur of the undertaking.
—To carry it out, the use of force is a right and a duty.
There is nothing arbitrary in this operation; for the ideal model is traced beforehand. If the State is omnipotent, it is for the purpose of "regenerating Mankind," and the theory which confers its rights, at the same time assigns to it its object. In what does this regeneration of Man consist?—Consider a domestic animal such as a dog or a horse. Scrawny, battered, tied up or chained, a thousand are strained and overworked compared to the few basking in idleness, dying from rich living; and with all of them, whether fat or lean, the soul is more spoiled than the body. A superstitious respect keeps them cowed under their burden, or makes them cringe before their master. Servile, slothful, gluttonous, feeble, incapable of resisting adversity, if they have acquired the miserable skills of slavery, they have also contracted its needs, weaknesses and vices. A crust of absurd habits and perverse inclinations, a sort of artificial and supplementary being, has covered over their original nature.—And, on the other hand, the better side of their original nature has had no chance to develop itself, for lack of use. Separated from the other, these two parts of its nature have not acquired the sentiment of community; they do not know, like their brethren of the prairies, how to help each other and subordinate private interests to the interests of the flock. Each pulls his own way, nobody cares for others, all are egoists; social interests have miscarried.—Such is Man nowadays, a disfigured slave that has to be restored. Our task, accordingly is two-fold: we have to demolish and we have to construct; we must first set free the natural Man that we may afterwards build up the social Man.
It is a vast enterprise and we are conscious of its vastness.
"It is necessary," says Billaud-Varennes,[2120] "that the people to which one desires to restore their freedom should in some way be created anew, since old prejudices must be destroyed, old habits changed, depraved affections improved, superfluous wants restricted, and inveterate vices extirpated."
But the task is sublime, as the aim is "to fulfill the desires of nature,[2121] accomplish the destinies of humanity, and fulfill the promises of philosophy".—"Our purpose," says Robespierre,[2122] "is to substitute morality for egoism, honesty for honor, principles for custom, duties for etiquette, the empire of reason for the tyranny of fashion, contempt of vice for indifference to misfortune, pride for arrogance, a noble mind for vanity, love of glory for the love of profit, good people for high society, merit for intrigue, genius for intellectual brilliancy, the charm of contentment for the boredom of voluptuous pleasure, the majesty of Man for the high-breeding of the great, a magnanimous, powerful and happy people for an amiable, frivolous and wretched people, that is to say, every virtue and miracle of the Republic in the place of the vices and absurdities of the monarchy."
We will do this, the whole of it, whatever the cost. Little do we care for the present generation: we are working for generations to come.
"Man, forced to isolate himself from society, anchors himself in the future and presses to his heart a posterity innocent of existing evils."[2123]
He sacrifices to this work his own and the lives of others.
"On the day that I am persuaded," writes Saint-Just, "that it is impossible to render the French people kind, energetic, tender and relentless against tyranny and injustice, I will stab myself."
—"What I have done in the South I will do in the North," says Baudot; "I will convert them into patriots; either they or I must die."—
"We will make France a cemetery," says Carrier, "rather than not regenerate it our own way."
In vain may the ignorant or the vicious protest; they protest because they are ignorant or vicious. In vain may the individual plead his personal rights; he has none: through the social contract, which is obligatory and solely valid, he has surrendered his entire being; having made no reservation, "he has nothing to claim." Undoubtedly, some will grumble, because, with them, the old wrinkle remains and artificial habits still cover over the original instinct. Untie the mill-horse, and he will still go round in the same track; let the mountebank's dog be turned loose, and he will still raise himself on his hind-legs; if we would bring them back to their natural gait we must handle them roughly. In like manner, to restore Man to his normal attitude, you must handle him roughly. But, in this respect, have no scruples,[2124] for we do not bow him down, we raise him up; as Rousseau says, "we compel him to be free;" we confer on him the greatest boon a human being can receive; we bring him back to nature and to justice. For this reason, now that he is warned, if he persists in his resistance, he is a criminal and merits every kind of chastisements[2125], for, he declares himself a rebel and a perjurer, inimical to humanity, and a traitor to the social compact.
IV. Two distortions of the natural man.
Two distortions of the natural man.—Positive religion.
—Proscription of the orthodox cult.—Measures against unsworn
priests.—Measures against the loyal orthodox.—Destruction
of the constitutional cult.—Pressure on the sworn priests.
—Churches closed and ceremonies suppressed.—Continuation of
these persecutions until the Consulate.
Let us (Taine lets the Jacobin say) begin by figuring to ourselves the natural man; certainly we of to-day have some difficulty in recognizing him; he bears but little resemblance to the artificial being who (in 1789) stands in his shoes, the creature which an antiquated system of constraint and fraud has deformed, held fast in his hereditary harness of thralldom and superstition, blinded by his religion and held in check by prestige, exploited by his government and tamed by dint of blows, always with a halter on, always put to work in the wrong way and against nature, whatever stall he may occupy, high or low, however full or empty his crib may be, now in menial service like the blinded hack-horse turning the mill-wheel, and now on parade like a trained dog which, decked with flags, shows off its antics before the public.[2126] But imagine all these out of the way, the flags and the bands, the fetters and compartments in the social stable, and you will see a new man appearing, the original man, intact and healthy in mind, soul and body.—In this condition, he is free of prejudice, he is not ensnared in a net of lies, he is neither Jew, Protestant nor Catholic; if he tries to imagine the universe as a whole and the principle of events, he will not let himself be duped by a pretended revelation; he will listen only to his own reason; he may chance, now and then, to become an atheist, but, generally, he will settle down into a deist.—In this condition of things he is not fettered by a hierarchy; he is neither noble nor commoner, land-owner nor tenant, inferior nor superior. Independent of the others, all are equal, and, if all agree in the forming of an association, their common-sense will stipulate that its first article shall secure the maintenance of this primordial equality.—Such is man, as nature made him, as history has unmade him, and as the Revolution is to re-make him.[2127] One cannot batter away too vigorously against the two casings that hold him tight, one the positive religion which narrows and perverts his intellect, and the other the social inequality which perverts and weakens his will;[2128] for, at every effort, some band is loosened, and, as each band gives way, the paralyzed limbs recover their action.
Let us trace, (say the Jacobins), the progress of this liberating operation.—Always timid and at loggerheads with the ecclesiastical organization, the Constituent Assembly could take only half-measures; it cut into the bark without daring to drive the ax into the solid trunk. Its work reduced itself down to the confiscation of clerical property, to a dissolution of the religious orders, and to a check upon the authority of the pope; its object was to establish a new church and transform priests into sworn functionaries of the State, and this was all. As if Catholicism, even administrative, would cease to be Catholicism! As if the noxious tree, once stamped with the public seal, would cease to be noxious! Instead of the old laboratory of falsehoods being destroyed another one is officially established alongside of it, so that there are now two instead of one. With or without the official label it operates in every commune in France and, as in the past, it distributes with impunity its drug to the public. This is precisely what we, (the Jacobins) cannot tolerate.—We must, indeed, keep up appearances, and, as far as words go, we will decree anew freedom of worship.[2129] But, in fact and in practice, we will demolish the laboratory and prevent the drug from being sold; there shall no longer be any Catholic worship in France, no baptism, no confession, no marriage, no extreme unction, no mass; nobody shall preach or listen to a sermon; nobody shall administer or receive a sacrament, save in secret, and with the prospect before him of imprisonment or the scaffold.—With this object in mind, we do one thing at a time. There is no problem with the Church claiming to be be orthodox: its members having refused to take the oath are outlaws; one excludes oneself from an association when one repudiates the pact; they have lost their qualifications as citizens and have become ordinary foreigners under the surveillance of the police; and, as they propagate around them discontent and disobedience, they are not only foreigners but seditious persons, enemies in disguise, the authors of a secret and widespread Vendée; it is not necessary for us to prosecute them as charlatans, it is sufficient to strike them down as rebels. As such, we have already banished from France all unsworn ecclesiastics, about forty thousand priests, and we are deporting those who did not cross the frontier within the allotted time: we allow only sexagenarians and the infirm to remain on French soil, and, again, as prisoners and in seclusion; they incur the penalty of death if they do not of their own accord report to the prisons of their country town; the banished who return home incur the penalty of death, and there is penalty of death against those who shelter priests.[2130] Consequently, in default of an orthodox clergy, there must no longer be an orthodox worship; the most dangerous of the two manufactories of superstition is shut down. That the sale of this poisonous food may be more surely stopped we punish those who ask for it the same as those who provide it, and we prosecute not only the pastors, but, again, the fanatics of the flock; if these are not the authors of the ecclesiastical rebellion they are its promoters and accomplices. Now, thanks to the schism among them, we already know who they are, and, in each commune, the list is made out. We style as fanatics all who reject the ministry of the sworn priests, the bourgeois who calls him an interloper, all the nuns who do not confess to him, all the peasants who stay away from his mass, all the old women who do not kiss his paten, and all the relations of an infant who do not wish him to baptize it. All these people and those who associate with them, whether allied, close relatives, friends, guests or visitors, of whatever class, either men or women, are seditious at heart, and, therefore, "suspects." We deprive them of their electoral rights, we withdraw their pensions, we impose on them special taxation, we confine them to their dwellings, we imprison them by thousands, and guillotine them by hundreds; the rest will gradually become discouraged and abandon an impracticable cult.[2131]—The lukewarm remain, the sheep-like crowd which holds on to its rites: the Constituent Assembly will seize them wherever it finds them, and, as they are the same in the authorized as in the refractory church, instead of seeking them with the priest who does not submit, it will seek them with the one who does. But it will proceed without zeal, without confidence, often even with distrust, questioning itself whether these rites, being administered by one who is excommunicated, are not of doubtful quality. Such a church is not sound, and we have only to give it a push to knock it down. We will do all we can to discredit constitutional priests: we will prohibit them from wearing the ecclesiastical costume, and force them by law to bestow the nuptial benediction on their apostate brethren; we will employ terror and imprisonment to constrain them to marry; we will given them no respite until they return to civil life, some admitting themselves to be impostors, many by surrendering their priestly credentials, and most of them by resigning their places.[2132] Deprived of leaders by these voluntary or forced desertions, the Catholic flock will allow itself to be easily led out of the fold, while, to remove all temptation to go back, we will tear the enclosure down. In the communes in which we are masters we will make the Jacobins of the place demand the abolition of worship, while, in other communes, we will get rid of this authoritatively through our missionary representatives. We will close the churches, demolish the steeples, melt down the bells, send all sacred vessels to the Mint, smash the images of the saints, desecrate relics, prohibit religious burials, impose the civil burial, prescribe rest during the décadi[2133] and labor on Sundays. No exception whatever. Since all positive religions deal in error, we will outlaw them all: we will exact from Protestant clergymen a public abjuration; we will not let the Jews practice their ceremonies; we will have "an 'auto-da-fé,' of all the books and symbols of the faith of Moses."[2134] But, of all these various juggling machines, the worst is the Catholic, the most hostile to nature due to the celibacy of its priesthood, the most opposed to reason in the absurdity of its dogmas, the most opposed to democracy, since its powers are delegated from above downwards, the best protected from civil authority because its head is outside of France.[2135] Accordingly, we must be most furious against it; even after Thermidor,[2136] we will keep up constant persecution, great and small; up to the Consulate, we will deport and shoot the priests, we will revive against fanatics the laws of the Reign of Terror, we will hamper their movements, we will exhaust their patience; we will keep them anxious during the day and restless at night; we will not give them a moment's repose.[2137] We will restrict the population to the decadal cult only; we will change the market-days, so that no believer shall be able to buy fish on a fast-day.[2138]—We have nothing more at heart than this war against Catholicism; no article on our program will be carried out with more determination and perseverance. The question involved is truth. We are its guardians, its champions, its ministers, and never did the servants of truth apply force with such minute detail and such effect to the extirpation of error.
V. Equality and Inequality.
Social inequality.—Malice of the aristocratic race.
—Measures against the King and Nobles.—Malice of the
aristocracy of wealth.—Measures against landowners,
capitalists and people with incomes.—Destruction of large
fortunes.—Measures taken to prevent the large fortunes in
reconstituting themselves.
Next to superstition there is another monster to be destroyed, and, also here it was the Constituent Assembly that had begun the assault. But it had also, through lack of courage or of logic, it stopped, after two or three feeble blows:
* Banning of heraldic insignia, titles of nobility and territorial names;
* abolition, without indemnity, of all the dues belonging to the seigneur by right of his former proprietorship over persons;
* abolition of the permission to purchase other feudal rights at a price agreed upon,
* limitation of royal power. This was little enough. When it concerns usurpers and tyrants they must be treated in another fashion; for their privilege is, of itself, an outrage on the rights of man. Consequently,
* we (the Jacobins) have dethroned the King and cut off his head;[2139]
* we have suppressed, without indemnity, the entire feudal debt, comprising the rights vested in the seigneurs by virtue of their being owners of real-estate, and merely lessors;
* we have abandoned their persons and possessions to the claims and rancor of local jacqueries;
* we have reduced them to emigration;
* we imprison them if they stay at home;
* we guillotine them if they return.
(As the aristocrats are)Reared in habits of supremacy, and convinced that they are of a different species from other men, the prejudices of their race are incorrigible; they are incapable of companionship with their social equals; we cannot too carefully crush them out, or, at the very least, hold them firmly down.[2140] Besides, they are guilty from the fact of having existed; for, they have taken both the lead and the command without any right to do so, and, in violation of all right, they have misused mankind; having enjoyed their rank, it is but just that they should pay for it. Privileged in reverse, they must be treated the same as vagabonds were treated under their reign,
* stopped by the police and sent off with their families into the interior,
* crowded into prisons,
* executed in a mass, or, at least,
* expelled from Paris, the seaports and fortified towns, put on the limits,
* compelled to present themselves daily at the municipality,
* deprived of their political rights,
* excluded from public offices, "popular clubs, committees of supervision and from communal and section assemblages."[2141]
Even this is indulgence; branded with infamy, we ought to class them with galley-slaves, and set them to work on the public highways.[2142]
"Justice condemns the people's enemies and the partisans of tyranny to eternal slavery."[2143]
But that is not enough, because, apart from the aristocracy of rank, there are other aristocracies which the Constituent Assembly has left untouched,[2144] especially the aristocracy of wealth. Of all the sovereignties, that of the rich man over the poor one is the most burdensome. In effect, not only, in contempt of equality, does he consume more than his share of the common products of labor, and without producing anything himself, but again, in contempt of liberty, he may fix wages as he pleases, and, in contempt of humanity, he always fixes them at the lowest point. Between himself and the needy he never makes other than the most unjust contracts. Sole possessor of land, capital and the necessities of life, he imposes conditions which others, deprived of means, are forced to accept at the risk of starvation; he speculates at his discretion on wants which cannot be put off, and makes the most of his monopoly by maintaining the poor in their destitute situations. That is why, writes Saint Just:[2145]
"Opulence is a disgrace; for every thousand livres expenditure of this kind a smaller number of natural or adopted children can be looked after."—
"The richest Frenchman," says Robespierre, "ought not to have now more three thousand livres rental."—
Beyond what is strictly necessary, no property is legitimate; we have the right to take the superfluous wherever we find it. Not only to-day, because we now require it for the State and for the poor, but at all times, because the superfluous, in all times, confers on its owner an advantage in contracts, a control of wages, an arbitrary power over the means of living, in short, a supremacy of condition worse than preeminence in rank. Consequently, our hand is not only against the nobles, but also against the rich and well-to-do bourgeois[2146] the large land-owners and capitalists; we are going to demolish their crafty feudalism from top to bottom.[2147]—In the first place, and merely through the effect of the new institutions, we prevent any capitalist from deducting, as he is used to do, the best portion of the fruits of another's labor; the hornets shall no longer, year after year, consume the honey of the bees. To bring this about, we have only to let the assignats (paper money) and their forced rate (of exchange) work things out. Through the depreciation of paper-money, the indolent land-owner or capitalist sees his income melting away in his hands; his receipts consist only of nominal values. On the 1st of January, his tenant pays him really for a half term instead of a full term; on the 1st of March, his farmer settles his account with a bag of grain.[2148] The effect is just the same as if we had made fresh contracts, and reduced by one-half, three-quarters, or, even more, the rate of interest on loans, the rent of houses and the leases of farm lands.—Whilst the revenue of the landlord evaporates, his capital melts away, and we do the best we can to help this along. If he has claims on ancient corporations or civil and religious establishments of any description, whether provincial governments, congregations, associations, endowments or hospitals, we withdraw his special guarantee; we convert his title-deeds into a state annuity, we combine his private fortune with the public fortune whether he will or not, we drag him into the universal bankruptcy, toward which we are conducting all the creditors of the Republic.[2149]—Besides, to ruin him, we have more direct and prompt means. If an émigré, and there are hundreds of thousands of émigrés, we confiscate his possessions. If he has been guillotined or deported, and there are tens of thousands of these, we confiscate his possessions. If he is "recognized as an enemy of the Revolution,"[2150] and "all the rich pray for the counter-revolution,"[2151] we sequestrate his property, enjoying the usufruct of it until peace is declared, and we shall have the property after the war is over. Usufruct or property, the State, in either case, inherits; at the most we might grant temporary aid to the family, which is not even entitled to maintenance.
It is impossible to uproot fortunes more thoroughly. As to those which are not at once eradicated we get rid of them piecemeal, and against these we employ two axes:
On the one hand, we decree the principle of progressive taxation, and on this basis we establish the forced loan:[2152] in incomes, we distinguish between the essential and the surplus; we fix according as the excess is greater or less we take a quarter, a third or the half of it, and, when above nine thousand francs, the whole; beyond its small alimentary reserve, the most opulent family will keep only four thousand five hundred francs income.
On the other hand, we cut deep into capital through revolutionary taxes; our committees and provincial proconsuls levy arbitrarily what suits them, three hundred, five hundred, up to one million two hundred thousand francs,[2153] on this or that banker, trader, bourgeois or widow, payable within a week; all the worse for the person taxed if he or she has no money on hand and is unable to borrow it; we declare them "suspects," we imprison them, we sequestrate their property and the State enjoys it in their place.
In any event, even when the amount is paid, we force him or her to deposit their silver and gold coin in our hands, sometimes with assignats as security, and often nothing; henceforth, money must circulate and the precious metals are in requisition;[2154] everybody will deliver up what plate he possesses. And let nobody presume to conceal his hoard; all treasure, whether silver-plate, diamonds, ingots, gold or silver, coined or un-coined, "discovered, or that may be discovered, buried in the ground or concealed in cellars, inside of walls or in garrets, under floors, pavements, or hearthstones, or in chimneys and other hiding places,"[2155] becomes the property of the Republic, with a premium of twenty per cent. in assignats to the informer.—As, furthermore, we make requisitions for bed-linen, beds, clothes, provisions, wines and the rests, along with specie and precious metals, the condition of the mansion may be imagined, especially after we have lodged in it; it is the same as if the house had been on fire; all movable property and all real estate have perished.—Now that both are destroyed they must not be allowed to accumulate again. To ensure this,
1. we abolish, according to rule, the freedom of bequest,[2156]
2. we prescribe equal and obligatory divisions of all inheritances;[2157]
3. we include bastards in this under the same title as legitimate children;
4. we admit representation à l'infini,[2158] "in order to multiply heirs and parcel out inheritances;"[2159]
5. we reduce the disposable portion to one-tenth, in the direct line, and one-sixth in a collateral line;
6. we forbid any gift to persons whose income exceeds one thousand quintals of grain;
7. we inaugurate adoption, "an admirable institution," and essentially republican, "since it brings about a division of large properties without a crisis."
Already, in the Legislative Assembly a deputy had stated that "equal rights could be maintained only by a persistent tendency to uniformity of fortunes."[2160]
We have provided for this for the present day and we likewise provide for it in the future.—None of the vast tumors which have sucked the sap of the human plant are to remain; we have cut them away with a few telling blows, while the steady-moving machine, permanently erected by us, will shear off their last tendrils should they change to sprout again.
VI. Conditions requisite for making a citizen.
Conditions requisite for making a citizen.—Plans for
suppressing poverty.—Measures in favor of the poor.
In returning Man to his natural condition we have prepared for the advent of the Social Man. The object now is to form the citizen, and this is possible only through a leveling of conditions. In a well made society there shall be "neither rich nor poor"[2161]: we have already destroyed the opulence which corrupts; it now remains for us to suppress the poverty which degrades. Under the tyranny of material things, which is as oppressive as the tyranny of men, Man falls below himself. Never will a citizen be made out of a poor fellow condemned to remain valet, hireling or beggar, reduced to thinking only of himself and his daily bread, asking in vain for work, or, plodding when he gets it, twelve hours a day at a monotonous pursuit, living like a beast of burden and dying in a alms-house.[2162] He should have his own bread, his own roof, and all that is indispensable for life; he must not be overworked, nor suffer anxiety or constraint;
"he must live independently, respect himself, have a tidy wife and healthy and robust children."[2163]
The community should guarantee him comfort, security, the certainty of not going hungry if he becomes infirm, and, if he dies, of not leaving his family in want.
"It is not enough," says Barère,[2164] "to bleed the rich, to pull down colossal fortunes; the slavery of poverty must be banished from the soil of the Republic. No more beggars, no more almsgiving, no poor-houses".
"The poor and unfortunates," says Saint Just, "are the powerful of the earth; they have a right to speak as masters to the governments which neglect them;[2165] they have a right to national charity.... In a democracy under construction, every effort should be made to free people from having to battle for the bare minimum needed for survival; by labor if he is fit for work, by education if he is a child, or with public assistance if he is an invalid or in old age."[2166]
And never had the moment been so favorable. "Rich in property, the Republic now expects to use the many millions the rich would have spent on a counter revolution for the improvement of the conditions of its less fortunate citizens... Those who would assassinate liberty have made it the richer. The possessions of conspirators exist for the benefit of the unfortunate."[2167]—Let the poor take with a clear conscience: it is not a charity but "an indemnity" which we provide for them; we save their pride by providing for their comfort, and we relieve them without humiliating them.
"We leave charity and benevolent works to the monarchies; this insolent and shabby way of furnishing assistance is fit only for slaves and masters; we substitute for it a system of national works, on a grand scale, over the whole territory of the Republic."[2168]
On the other hand, we cause a statement to be drawn up in each commune, of "the condition of citizens without property," and "of national possessions not disposed of;" we divide these possession in small lots; we distribute them "in the shape of national sales" to poor folks able to work. We give, "through the form of rental, "an acre to each head of a family who has less than an acre of his own. "We thus bind all citizens to the country as well as to property. We restore idle and robust arms to the soil, and lost or weakened families to the workshops in the towns."—As to old and infirm farmers or craftsmen, also poor mothers, wives and widows of artisans and farmers, we keep in each department a "big ledger of national welfare;" we inscribe thereon for every thousand inhabitants, four farmers, two mechanics, five women, either mothers or widows; each registered person shall be pensioned by the State, the same as a maimed soldier; labor-invalids are as respectable as war-invalids.—Over and above those who are thus aided on account of poverty, we relieve and elevate the entire poor class, not alone the thirteen hundred thousand destitutes counted in France,[2169] but, again, all who, having little or no means on hand, live from day to day on what they can earn. We have passed a law[2170] by which the public treasury shall, through a tax on large fortunes, "furnish to each commune or district the necessary funds for adapting the price of bread to the rate of wages." Our representatives in the provinces impose on the wealthy the obligation of "lodging, feeding, and clothing all infirm, aged, and indigent citizens and orphans of their respective cantons."[2171] Through the decree on monopolization and the establishment of the "maximum" we bring within reach of the poor all objects of prime necessity. We pay them forty sous a day for attending district meetings; and three francs a day for serving on committees of surveillance. We recruit from amongst them our revolutionary army;[2172] we select amongst them the innumerable custodians of sequesters: in this way, hundreds of thousands of sans-culottes enter into the various public services.—At last, the poor are taken out of a state of poverty: each will now have his plot of ground, his salary or pension;
"in a well-ordered republic nobody is without some property."[2173]
Henceforth, among individuals, the difference in welfare will be small; from the maximum to the minimum, there will be only a degree, while there will be found in every dwelling about the same sort of household, a plain, simple household, that of the small rural proprietor, well-off farmer or factory foreman; that of Rousseau at Montmorency, or that of the Savoyard Vicar, or that of Duplay, the carpenter, with whom Robespierre lodges.[2174] There will be no more domestic servitude: "only the bond of help and gratitude will exists between employer and employee."[2175]—He who works for another citizen belongs to his family and sits at his table."[2176]—Through the transformation of lower social classes into middle class conditions we restore human dignity, and out of the proletarian, the valet and the workman, we begin to liberate the citizen.
VII. Socialist projects.
Repression of Egoism.—Measures against farmers,
manufacturers and merchants.—Socialist projects.
—Repression of Federalism.—Measures against the local,
professional and family spirit.
Two leading obstacles hinder the development of civism, and the first is egoism. Whilst the citizen prefers the community to himself, the egoist prefers himself to the community. He cares only for his own interest, he gives no heed to public necessities; he sees none of the superior rights which take precedence of his derived right; he supposes that his property is his own without restriction or condition; he forgets that, if he is allowed to use it, he must not use it to another's detriment.[2177] This even the middle or low class, who possess goods essential for survival, will do. The greater the demand for these goods the higher they raise their prices; soon, they sell only at an exorbitant rate, and worse still, stop selling and store their goods or products, in the expectation of selling them dearer. In this way, they speculate on another's wants; they augment the general distress and become public enemies. Nearly all the agriculturists, manufacturers and tradesmen of the day, little and big, are public enemies—farmers, tenant farmers, market-gardeners, cultivators of every degree, as well as foremen, shopkeepers, especially wine-dealers, bakers and butchers.
"All merchants are essentially anti-revolutionaries, and would sell their country to gain a few pennies."[2178]
We will not tolerate this legal brigandage. Since "agriculture has done nothing for liberty and has sought only its own gain,"[2179] we will put it under surveillance, and, if necessary, under control. Since "commerce has become a species of miserly tyrant," since "it has become self-paralyzed," and, "through a sort of anti-revolutionary contempt, neglected the manufacture, handling and expedition of diverse materials," we will thwart "the calculations of its barbarous arithmetic, and purge it of the aristocratic and corrupting fermentation which oppresses it." We make monopoly "a capital crime;"[2180] we call him a monopolist who "takes food and wares of prime necessity out of circulation," and "keeps them stored without daily and publicly offering them for sale." Penalty of death against whoever, within eight days, does not make a declaration, or if he makes a false one. Penalty of death against the dealer who does not post up the contents of his warehouse, or who does not keep open shop. Penalty of death against any person who keeps more bread on hand than he needs for his subsistence.[2181] Penalty of death against the cultivator who does not bring his grain weekly to market. Penalty of death against the dealer who does not post up the contents of his warehouse, or who does not keep open shop. Penalty of death against the manufacturer who does not verify the daily use of his workable material.—As to prices, we intervene authoritatively between buyer and seller; we fix the maximum price for all objects which, near or remotely, serve to feed, warm and clothe man; we will imprison whoever offers or demands anything more. Whether the dealer or manufacturer pays expenses at this rate, matters not; if, after the maximum is fixed, he closes factory, or gives up business, we declare him a "suspect;" we chain him down to his pursuit, we oblige him to lose by it.—This is the way to clip the claws of beasts of prey, little and big! But the claws grow out again, and, instead of paring them down, it would probably be better to pull them out. Some amongst us have already thought of that; the right of pre-emption shall be applied to every article; "in each department, national storehouse might be established where farmers, land-owners and manufacturers would be obliged to deposit at a fixed price, paid down, the surplus of their consumption of every species of merchandise. The nation would distribute this merchandise to wholesale dealers, reserving a profit of six per cent. The profit of the wholesale dealer would be fixed at eight per cent and that of the retailer at twelve per cent."[2182] In this way, farmers, manufacturers, and merchants would all become clerks of the State, appointed on a premium or a discount; unable to gain a great deal, they would not be tempted to gain too much; they would cease to be greedy and soon cease to be egoists.[2183]—Since, fundamentally, egoism is the capital vice and individual proprietorship the food that nourishes it, why not suppress individual proprietorship altogether? Our extreme logicians, with Babæuf at the head of them, go as far as that, and Saint-Just seems to be of that opinion.[2184] We are not concerned with the enacting of an Agrarian; the nation may reserve the soil to itself and divide among individuals, not the soil, but its lease. The outcome of this principle affords us a glimpse of an order of things in which the State, sole proprietor of real-estate, sole capitalist, sole manufacturer, sole trader, having all Frenchmen in its pay and service, would assign to each one his task according to his aptitude, and distribute to each one his rations according to his wants.[2185]—These various uncompleted plans still float in a hazy distance but their common purpose is clearly distinguishable.
"All which tends to center human passions on the vile, individual ego must be repudiated or repressed;"[2186]
We should annihilate special interests, deprive the individual of the motives and means for self-isolation, suppress preoccupations and ambitions by which Man makes himself a focal point at the expense of the real center, in short, to detach him from himself in order to attach him wholly to the State.
This is why, disregarding the narrow egoism through which the individual prefers himself to the community, we strive towards the enlarged egoism by which the individual prefers the community to the group of which he forms a part. Under no pretext must he separate himself from the whole, at no price, must he be allowed to form for himself a small homeland within the large one, for, by the affection he entertains for the small one, he frustrates the objects of the large one. Nothing is worse than political, civil, religious and domestic federalism; we combat it under all its forms.[2187] In this particular, the Constituent Assembly has paved the way for us, since it has broken up all the principal historic or material groups by which men have separated themselves from the masses and formed a band apart, provinces, clergy, nobles, parliaments, religious orders and trades-unions. We complete its work, we destroy churches, we suppress literary or scientific associations, educational or benevolent societies, even down to financial companies.[2188] We prohibit any departmental or commercial "local spirit:" we find
"odious and opposed to all principles, that, amongst municipalities, some should be rich and others poor, that one should have immense patrimonial possessions and another nothing but debts."[2189]
We regard these possessions as the nation's, and we place indebtedness to the nation's account. We take grain from rich communes and departments, to feed poor communes and departments. We build bridges, roads and canals of each district, at the expense of the State; "we centralize the labor of the French people in a broad, opulent fashion."[2190] We want no more local interests, recollections, dialects, idioms and patriotisms. Only one bond should subsist between individuals, that which attaches them to the social body. We sunder all others; we do not tolerate any special aggregation; we do the best we can to break up the most tenacious of all, the family.—We therefore give marriage the status of an ordinary contract: we render this loose and precarious, resembling as much as possible the free and transient union of the sexes; it shall be dissolved at the option of both parties, and even of one of the parties, after one month of formalities and of probation. If the couple has lived separate six months; the divorce may be granted without any probation or delay; divorced parties may re-marry. On the other hand, we suppress marital authority: since spouses are equal, each has equal rights over common property and the property of each other; we deprive the husband of its administration and render it "common" to both parties. We abolish "paternal authority;"
"it is cheating nature to enforce her rights through constraint.. .. The only rights that parents have are those of protection and watchfulness."[2191]
The father can no longer control the education of his children; the State takes charge of it. The father is no longer master of his property; that portion he can dispose of by donation or testament is of the smallest; we prescribe an equal and forced division of property.—Finally we preach adoption, we efface bastardy, we confer on children born of free love, or of a despotic will, the same rights as those of legitimate children. In short, we break that sacred circle, that exclusive group, that aristocratic organization which, under the name of the family, was created out of pride and egoism.[2192]—Henceforth, affection and obedience will no longer be frittered away; the miserable supports to which they have clung like ivy vines, castes, churches, corporations, provinces, communes or families, are ruined and rooted out; on the ground which is thus leveled, the State alone remains standing, and it alone offers any point of adhesion; all these vines are about to twine themselves in on trunk about the great central column.
VIII. Indoctrination of mind and intellect.
Indoctrination of mind and intellect.—Civil religion.
—National education.—Egalitarian moral standards.
—Obligatory civism.—The recasting and reduction of human
nature to the Jacobin type.
Let not Man go astray, let us lead him on, let us direct minds and souls, and, to this end, let us enfold him in our doctrines. He needs general ideas and the daily experiences flowing out of them; he needs some theory explaining the origin and nature of things, one which assigns him his place and the part he has to play in the world, which teaches him his duties, which regulates his life, which fixes the days he shall work and the days he shall rest, which stamps itself on his mind through commemorations, festivals and ceremonies, through a catechism and a calendar. Up to this time Religion has been the power charged with this service, interpreted and served by the Church; now it is to be Reason, interpreted and served by the State.—In this connection, many among us, disciples of the encyclopedists, constitute Reason a divinity, and honor her with a system of worship; but it is plain that they personify an abstraction; their improvised goddess is simply an allegorical phantom; none of them see in her the intelligent cause of the world; in the depths of their hearts they deny this Supreme Cause, their pretended religion being merely a show or a sham.—We discard atheism, not only because it is false, but again, and more especially, because it is disintegrating and unwholesome.[2193] We want an effective, consolatory and fortifying religion, and that religion is natural religion, which is social as well as true. "Without this,[2194] as Rousseau has said, it is impossible to be a good citizen......The existence of divinity, the future life, the sacredness of the social contract and of the laws," all are its dogmas; "no one may be forced to believe in these, but whoever dares say that he does not believe in them, sets himself up against the French people, the human species and nature." Consequently, we decree that "the French people recognizes the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul."—The important thing now is to plant this entirely philosophic faith in all hearts. We introduce it into the civil order of things, we take the calendar out of the hands of the Church, we purge it of its Christian imagery; we make the new era begin with the advent of the Republic; we divide the year according to the metric system, we name the months according to the vicissitudes of the seasons, "we substitute, in all directions, the realities of reason for the visions of ignorance, the truths of nature for a sacerdotal prestige,"[2195] the decade for the week, the décadi for Sundays, lay festivals for ecclesiastical festivals.[2196] On each décadi, through solemn and appropriate pomp, we impress on the popular mind one of the highest truths of our creed; we glorify, in the order of their dates, Nature, Truth, Justice, Liberty, Equality, the People, Adversity, Humanity, the Republic, Posterity, Glory, Patriotism, Heroism, and other virtues. Besides this, we honor the important days of the Revolution, the taking of the Bastille, the fall of the Throne, the punishment of the tyrant, the expulsion of the Girondins. We, too, have our anniversaries, our relics, the relics of Chalier and Marat,[2197] our processions, our services, our ritual,[2198] and the vast system of visible pageantry by which dogmas are made manifest and propagated. But ours, instead of leading men off to an imaginary heaven, brings them back to a living patrimony, and, through our ceremonies as well as through our creed, we shall preach public-spiritedness (civism).
It is important to preach this to adults, it is still more important to teach it to children: for children are more easily molded than adults. Our hold on these still flexible minds is complete, and, through national education "we seize the coming generations."[2199] Naught is more essential and naught is more legitimate.
"The country," says Robespierre, "has a right to bring up its own children; it cannot confide this trust to family pride nor to the prejudices of individuals, the eternal nourishment of aristocracies and of a domestic federalism which narrows the soul by keeping it isolated." We are determined to have "education common and equal for all French people," and "we stamp on it a great character, analogous to the nature of our government and the sublime doctrines of our Republic. The aim is no longer to form gentlemen (messieurs) but citizens."[21100]
We oblige[21101] teachers, male and female, to present certificates of civism, that is to say, of Jacobinism. We close the school if "precepts or maxims opposed to revolutionary morality" are taught in it, that is to say, in conformity with Christian morals. Children will learn to read in the Declaration of Rights and in the Constitution of 1793. Republican manuals and catechisms will be prepared for their use.[21102] "They must be taught the virtuous traits which most honor free men, and especially the traits characteristic of the French Revolution, the best calculated to elevate the soul and render them worthy of equality and liberty." The 14th of July, 10th of August, 2nd of September, 21st of January, and 31st of May must be lauded or justified in their presence. They must be taken to meetings of the municipalities, to the law courts,[21103] and especially to the popular clubs; from these pure sources they will derive a knowledge of their rights, of their duties, of the laws, of republican morality," and, on entering society, they will find themselves imbued with all good maxims. Over and above their political opinions we shape their ordinary habits. We apply on a grand scale the plan of education drawn out by Jean-Jacques (Rousseau).[21104] We want no more literary prigs; in the army, "the 'dandy' breaks down during the first campaign;[21105] we want young men able to endure privation and fatigue, toughened, like Emile, "by hard work" and physical exercise.—We have, thus far, only sketched out this department of education, but the agreement amongst the various plans shows the meaning and bearings of our principle. "Children generally, without exception, says Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau,[21106] the boys from five to twelve, the girls from five to eleven years of age, must be brought up in common at the expense of the Republic; all, under the sacred law of equality, are to receive the same clothing, the same food, the same education, the same attention "in boarding-schools distributed according to cantons, and containing each from four to six hundred pupils.
"Pupils will be made to submit every day and every moment to the same rigid rules... Their beds must be hard, their food healthy, but simple, their clothing comfortable, but coarse." Servants will not be allowed; children must help themselves and, besides this, they must wait on the old and infirm, lodged with or near them. "Among daily duties, manual labor will be the principal thing; all the rest will be accessory." Girls must learn to spin, sew and wash clothes; the boys will work the roads, be shepherds, ploughmen and work-hands; both will have tasks set them, either in the school-workshops, or in the fields and factories in the neighborhood; they will be hired out to surrounding manufacturers and to the tillers of the soil. Saint-Just is more specific and rigid.[21107] "Male children from five to sixteen years of age, must be raised for their country. They must be clad in common cloth at all seasons, and have mats for beds, and sleep eight hours. They are to have common food only, fruits, vegetables, preparations of milk, bread and water. They must not eat meat before sixteen.. Their education, from ten to sixteen, is to be military and agricultural. They will be formed into companies of sixty; six companies make a battalion; the children of a district form a legion; they will assemble annually at the district town, encamp there and drill in infantry tactics, in arenas specially provided for the purpose; they will also learn cavalry maneuvers and every other species of military evolution. In harvest time they are to be distributed amongst the harvesters." After sixteen, "they enter the crafts," with some farmer, artisan, merchant or manufacturer, who becomes their titular "instructor," and with whom they are bound to remain up to the age of twenty-one, "under the penalty of being deprived for life of a citizen's rights.[21108]... All children will dress alike up to sixteen years of age; from twenty-one to twenty-five, they will dress as soldiers, if they are not in the magistracy."—Already we show the effects of the theory by one striking example; we founded the "Ecole de Mars;"[21109] we select out of each district six boys from sixteen to seventeen and a half years old "among the children of sans-culottes;" we summon them to Paris, "to receive there, through a revolutionary education, whatever belongs to the knowledge and habits of a republican soldier. They are schooled in fraternity, in discipline, in frugality, in good habits, in love of country and in detestation of kings." three or four thousand young people are lodged at the Sablons, "in a palisaded enclosure, the intervals of which are guarded by chevaux de frises and sentinels."[21110] We puts them into tents; we feed them with bran bread, rancid pork, water and vinegar; we drill them in the use of arms; we march them out on national holidays and stimulate them with patriotic harangues.—Suppose all Frenchmen educated in such a school; the habits they acquire in youth will persist in the adult, and, in each adult we shall find the sobriety, energy and patriotism of a Spartan or Roman.
Already, under the pressure of our decrees, civism affects customs, and there are manifest signs, on all sides, of public regeneration. "The French people," says Robespierre, "seems to have outstripped the rest of humanity, by two thousand years; one might be tempted to regard them, living amongst them, as a different species. In the rest of Europe, a ploughman, an artisan, is an animal formed for the pleasures of a noble; in France, the nobles are trying to transform themselves into ploughmen and artisans, but do not succeed in obtaining that honor."[21111] Life in all directions is gradually assuming democratic forms Wealthy prisoners are prohibited from purchasing delicacies, or procuring special conveniences; they eat along with the poor prisoners the same ration, at the common mess[21112]. Bakers have orders to make but one quality of bread, the brown bread called equality bread, and, to obtain his ration, each person must place himself in line with the rest of the crowd. On holidays[21113] everybody will bring his provisions down into the street and eat as one family with his neighbor; on décadi all are to sing and dance together, pell-mell, in the temple of the Supreme being. The decrees of the Convention and the orders of the representatives impose the republican cockade on women; public opinion and example impose on men the costume and appearance of sans-culottes we see even dandies wearing mustaches, long hair, red cap, vest and heavy wooden shoes.[21114] Nobody calls a person Monsieur or Madame; the only titles allowed are citoyen and citoyenne while thee and Thou is the general rule. Rude familiarity takes the place of monarchical politeness; all greet each other as equals and comrades.[21115] There is now only one tone, one style, one language; revolutionary forms constitute the tissue of speech, as well as of written discourse; thought now seems to consists entirely of our ideas and phrases.[21116] All names are transformed, those of months and of days, those of places and of monuments, baptismal names and names of families: St. Denis has become Franciade; Peter Gaspard is converted into Anaxagoras, and Antoine-Louis into Brutus; Leroi, the deputy, calls himself Laloi, and Leroy, the jurist, calls himself August-Tenth.—By dint of thus shaping the exterior we reach the interior, and through outward civism we prepare internal civism. Both are obligatory, but the latter much more so than the former; for that is the fundamental principle,[21117] "the incentive which sustains and impels a democratic and popular government." It is impossible to apply the social contract if everybody does not scrupulously observe the first clause of it, namely, the complete surrender of himself to the community; everybody, then, must give himself up entirely, not only actually but heartily, and devote himself to the public good, which public good is the regeneration of Man as we have defined it. The veritable citizen is he who thus marches along with us. With him, as with us, abstract truths of philosophy control the conscience and govern the will. He starts with our articles of faith and follows them out to the end; he endorses our acts, he recites our creed, he observes our discipline, he is a believing and practicing Jacobin, an orthodox Jacobin, unsullied, and without taint of heresy or schism. Never does he swerve to the left toward exaggeration, nor to the right toward toleration; without haste or delay he travels along the narrow, steep and straight path which we have marked out for him; this is the pathway of reason, for, as there is but one reason, there is but one pathway. Let no one swerve from the line; there are abysses on each side of it. Let us follow our guides, men of principles, the pure, especially Couthon, Saint-Just and Robespierre; they are choice specimens, all cast in the true mold, and it is this unique and rigid mold in which all French men are to be recast.
2101 ([return])
[ This and the following text are taken from the "Contrat-Social" by Rousseau. Cf. "The ancient Régime," book III., ch.. IV.]
2102 ([return])
[ This idea, so universally prevalent and precocious, is uttered by Mirabeau in the session of the 10th of August, 1789. (Buchez et Roux, II., 257.) "I know of but three ways of maintaining one's existence in society, and these are to be either a beggar, a robber or a hireling. The proprietor is himself only the first of hirelings. What we commonly call his property is nothing more than the pay society awards him for distributing amongst others that which is entrusted to him to distribute through his expenses and through what he consumes; proprietors are the agents, the stewards of the social body.">[
2103 ([return])
[ Report by Roland, January 6, 1793, and by Cambon, February 1, 1793.]
2104 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXXI., 311. Report by Saint-Just, Ventôse 8, year II., and decree in conformity therewith.]
2105 ([return])
[ Decree of 13 Brumaire, year II.—Report by Cambon, Feb. 1, 1793. Cambon estimates the property alone of the order of Malta and of the colleges at four hundred million livres.]
2106 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVIII., 419 and 486. Reports by Cambon, Brumaire 22 and Frimaire 1st, year II. "Let us begin with taking possession of the leased domains, notwithstanding preceding laws.">[
2107 ([return])
[ Cf. "The Ancient Régime," p. 14.]
2108 ([return])
[ Mallet-Dupan, "Mémoires," II., 19. Moniteur, XVIII., 565. (Report by Cambon, 11 Frimaire, year II.) Requested to do so by a popular club of Toulouse, the department of Haute-Garonne has ordered all possessors of articles in gold or silver to bring them to the treasuries of their districts to be exchanged for assignats. This order has thus far brought into the Toulouse treasury about one million five hundred thousand or one million six hundred thousand livres in gold and silver. The same at Montauban and other places. "Several of our colleagues have even decreed the death penalty against whoever did not bring their gold and silver within a given time.">[
2109 ([return])
[ Archives Nationales, AF. II., 106. (Order by representative Beauchamp, l'Isle Jourdan, Pluviose 2, year II.) "All blue and green cloaks in the departments of Haute-Garonne, as well as of the Landes, Gers and others, are put in requisition from the present day. Every citizen possessing blue or green cloaks is required to declare them at the depot of municipality or other locality where he may chance to be." If not, he is considered "suspect" is treated as such.—Ibid., AF.II., 92 (Order issued by Taillefer, Brumaire 3, year II., at Villefranche-l'Aveyron).—De Martel, "Etude sur Fouché," 368. (Order by Fouché, Collot d'Herbois and Delaporte: Lyons, Brumaire 21, year II.)—Moniteur, XVIII., 384. (Session of 19th Brumaire. Letter of Barras and Fréron, dated at Marseilles.)—Moniteur XVIII., 513 (Orders by Lebon and Saint-Just, at Strasbourg, Brumaire 24 and 25, year II.) Letter of Isoré to the minister Bouchotte, November 4, 1793. (Legros, "La Revolution telle qu'elle est.") The principle of these measures was laid down by Robespierre in his speech on property (April 24, 1793), and in his declaration of rights unanimously adopted by the Jacobin Club (Buchez et Roux, XXVI., 93 and 130).]
2110 ([return])
[ Rousset, "Les Volontaires," p. 234 and 254.]
2111 ([return])
[ Report by Cambon, Pluviose 3, year III., p.3. "One fifth of the active population is employed in the common defense."—Decree of May 12, and Aug. 23, 1793.—Decree of November 22, 1793.—Order of the Directory, October 18, 1798.]
2112 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XIX., 631. Decree of Ventôse 14, year II. Archives Nationales, D.SI., 10. (Orders by representatives Delacroix, Louchet and Legendre; Pont-Audemer, Frimaire 14, year II.)—Moniteur, XVIII, 622.—(Decree of Frimaire 18, year II.)]
2113 ([return])
[ Lenin must have read Taine's text during his long studious stay in Paris. He and Stalin did, in any case try to let the USSR function in accordance with such central allocated planning. (SR.)]
2114 ([return])
[ Decree of 15-18 Floréal, year II. Decree of September 29, 1793, (in which forty objects of prime necessity are enumerated.—Article 9 decrees three days imprisonment against workmen and manufacturers who "without legitimate reason, shall refuse to do their ordinary task."—Decrees of September 16 and 20, 1793, and that of September 11, articles 16,19, 20 and 21.]
2115 ([return])
[ Archives Nationales, AF. II., III. Order of the representative Ferry; Bourges, 23 Messidor, year II.—Ibid., AF. II., 106. Order of the representative Dartigoyte, Auch, Prairial 18, year II.]
2116 ([return])
[ Decree of Brumaire 11, year II., article 7.]
2117 ([return])
[ Gouvion Saint Cyr, "Mémoires sur les campagnes de 1792 à la paix de Campo-Formio," I., 91-109: "Promotion, which every one feared at this time."... Ibid. 229. "Men who had any resources obstinately held aloof from any kind of advancement." Archives Nationales, DS. I, 5. (Mission of representative Albert in L'Aube and La Marne, and especially the order issued by Albert, Chalons, Germinal 7, year III., with the numerous petitions of judges and town officers soliciting their removal.—Letter of the painter Gosse (published in Le Temps, May 31, 1872), which is very curious, showing the trials of those in private life during the Revolution: "My father was appointed charity commissioner and quartermaster for the troops; at the time of the Reign of Terror it would have been imprudent to have refused any office"—Archives Nationales, F7, 3485. The case of Girard Toussaint, notary at Paris, who "fell under the sword of the law, Thermidor 9, year II." This Girard, who was very liberal early in the revolution, was president of his section in 1789, but, after the 10th of August, he had kept quiet. The committee of the section of the "Amis de la Patrie," "considering that citizen Girard.... came forward only at the time when the court and Lafayette prevailed against the sans-culottes;" that, "since equality was established by the Revolution he has deprived his fellow citizens of his knowledge, which, in a revolution, is criminal, unanimously agree that the said citizen is "suspect" and order "him to be sent to the Luxembourg.">[
2118 ([return])
[ Ludovic Sciout, "Histoire de la Constitution civile du clergé," IV., 131, 135. (Orders issued by Dartigoyte and de Pinet).—"Recueil de pieces authentiques serrant à l'histoire de la révolution à Strasbourg." Vol. I. p. 230. (Speech by Schneider at Barr, for marrying the patriot Funck.) Schneider, it appears, did still better on his own account. (Ibid., 317).]
2119 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXIX., 160. (Report of Saint-Just, October 20, 1793.) "You have to punish not only traitors, but even the indifferent; you must punish all in the Republic who are passive and do nothing for it.">[
2120 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXXII., 338. Report of the Convention on the theory of democratic government, by Billaud-Varennes (April 20, 1794).]
2121 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXXI., 270. Report by Robespierre, on the principles which should guide the National Convention in the internal administration of the Republic, February 5, 1794.—Cf. "The ancient Régime," 227-230, the ideas of Rousseau, of which those of Robespierre are simply a recast.]
2122 ([return])
[ Ibid., 270.—The pretension of reforming men's sentiments is found in all the programs. Ibid., 305. (Report of Saint-Just, February 26, 1794.) "Our object is to create an order of things establishing a universal inclination toward the good, and to have factions immediately hurled upon the scaffold." Ibid., 337. (Report of Saint-Just, March 13, 1794.—Ibid., 337. (Report of Saint-Just, March 13, 1794.) "We see but one way of arresting the evil, and that is to convert the revolution into a civil power and wage war on every species of perversity, as designedly created amongst us for the enervation of the republic.">[
2123 ([return])
[ Ibid., XXXV., 276. (Institutions, by Saint-Just.—Ibid., 287.)—Moniteur, XVIII., 343. Meeting of the Jacobin Club, Brumaire 13, year II., speech by Baudot.]
2124 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXIX, 142. (Speech by Jean Bon St. André in the Convention, Sep. 25, 1793.) "We are said to exercise arbitrary power, we are charged with being despots. We, despots!... Ah, no doubt, if despotism is to secure the triumph of liberty, such a despotism is political regeneration." (Applause.)—Ibid, XXXI., 276. (Report by Robespierre, Pluviose 17, year, II.) "It has been said that terror is the incentive of despotic government. Does yours, then, resemble despotism? Yes, as the sword which flashes in the hands of the heroes of liberty, resembles that with which the satellites of tyranny are armed..... The government of the Revolution is the despotism of freedom against tyranny.">[
2125 ([return])
[ Ibid., XXXII, 353. Decree of April 1791. "The Convention declares, that, supported by the virtues of the French people, it will insure the triumph of the democratic revolution and show no pity in punishing its enemies.">[
2126 ([return])
[ In the following portrayal of the ancient régime, the bombast and credulity of the day overflows in the most extravagant exaggerations (Buchez et Roux, XXXI., 300, Report, by Saint-Just, February 26, 1794.): "In 1788, Louis XVI. Caused eight thousand persons of both sexes and of every age to be sacrificed in the rue Meslay and on the Pont-Neuf. These scenes were repeated by the court on the Champs de Mars; the court had hangings in the prisons, and the bodies of the drowned found in the Seine were its victims. These were four hundred thousand prisoners in confinement; fifteen thousand smugglers were hung in a year, and three thousand men were broken on the wheel; there were more prisoners in Paris than there are now... Look at Europe. There are four millions of people shut up in Europe whose shrieks are never heard."—Ibid., XXIV., 132. (Speech by Robespierre, May 10, 1793). "Up to this time the art of governing has simply consisted in the art of stripping and subduing the masses for the benefit of the few, and legislation, the mode of reducing these outrages to a system.">[
2127 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXXII., 353. (Report by Robespierre to the Convention, May 7, 1794.) "Nature tells us that man is born for freedom while the experience of man for centuries shows him a slave. His rights are written in his heart and history records his humiliation.">[
2128 ([return])
[ Ibid., 372. "Priests are to morality what charlatans are to medical practice. How different is the God of nature from the God of the priests! I know of nothing which is so much like atheism as the religions they have manufactured." Already, in the Constituent Assembly, Robespierre wanted to prevent the father from endowing a child. "You have done nothing for liberty if yours laws do not tend to diminish by mild and effective means the inequality of fortunes." (Hamel, I., 403.)]
2129 ([return])
[ Decree of Frimaire 18, year II.—Note the restrictions: "The convention, in the foregoing arrangement, has no idea of derogating from any law or precaution for public safety against refractory or turbulent priests, or against those who might attempt to abuse the pretext of religion in order to compromise the cause of liberty. Nor does it mean to disapprove of what has thus far been done by virtue of the ordinances of representatives of the people, nor to furnish anybody with a pretext for unsettling patriotism and relaxing the energy of public spirit.">[
2130 ([return])
[ Decrees of May 27, and August 26, 1792, March 18, April 21 and October 20, 1793, April 11, and May 11, 1794.—Add (Moniteur, XIX., 697) the decree providing for the confiscation of the possessions of ecclesiastics "who have voluntarily left or been so reported, who are retired as old or inform, or who have preferred transportation to retirement."—Ibid., XVIII., 492, (session of Frimaire 2). A speech by Forester. "As to the priesthood, its continuation has become a disgrace and even a crime."—Archives Nationales, AF. II., 36. (An order by Lequinio, representative of the people of Charante-Inférieur, la Vendée and Deux-Sèvres, Saintes, Nivose 1, year II.) "In order that freedom of worship may exist in full plenitude it is forbidden to all whom it may concern to preach or write in favor of any form of worship or religious opinion whatsoever." And especially "it is expressly forbidden to any former minister, belonging to any religious sect whatever, to preach, write or teach morality under penalty of being regarded as a suspect and, as such, immediately put under arrest.. .. Every man who undertakes to preach any religious precepts whatsoever is, by that fact, culpable before the people. He violates ... social equality, which does not permit the individual to publicly raise his ideal pretensions above those of his neighbor.">[
2131 ([return])
[ Ludofic Sciout, "Histoire de la Constitution Civile du clergé," vols. III. and IV., passim.—Jules Sauzay, "Histoire de la persécution révolutionaire dans le Doubs," vols. III., IV., V., and VI., particularly the list, at the end of the work, of those deported, guillotined, sent into the interior and imprisoned.]
2132 ([return])
[ Order of the day of the Convention September 17, 1792; circular of the Executive Council, January 22, 1793; decrees of the Convention, July 19, August 12, September 17, November 15, 1793.—Moniteur, October, and November, 1793, passim. (November 23, Order of the Paris Commune, closing the churches.)—In relation to the terror the constitutional priests were under, I merely give the following extracts (Archives Nationales, F7,31167): "Citizen Pontard, bishop of the department of Dordogne, lodging in the house of citizen Bourbon, No. 66 faubourg Saint-Honoré, on being informed that there was an article in a newspaper called "le Republican" stating that a meeting of priests had been held in the said house, declares that he had no knowledge of it; that all the officers in charge of the apartments are in harmony with the Revolution; that, if he had had occasion to suspect such a circumstance, he would have move out immediately, and that if any motive can possibly be detected in such a report it is his proposed marriage with the niece of citizen Caminade, an excellent patriot and captain of the 9th company of the Champs-Elysées section, a marriage which puts an end to fanaticism in his department, unless this be done by the ordination of a priest à la sans-culotte which he had done yesterday in the chapel, another act in harmony with the Revolution. It is well to add, perhaps, that one of his curés now in Paris has called on him, and that he came to request him to second his marriage. The name of the said curé is Greffier Sauvage; he is still in Paris, and is preparing to be married the same time as himself. Aside from these motives, which may have given rise to some talk, citizen Pontard sees no cause whatever for suspicion. Besides, so thoroughly patriotic as he, he asks nothing better than to know the truth, in order to march along unhesitatingly in the revolutionary path. He sighs his declaration, promising to support the Revolution on all occasions, by his writings as well as by his conduct. He presents the two numbers of his journal which he has had printed in Paris in support of the principles he adheres to. At Paris, September 7, 1793, year II. Of the Republic, one and indivisible. F. Pontard, bishop of the Republic in the department of Dordogne."—Dauban La Demagogie en 1793, p. 557. Arrest of representative Osselin, letter his brother, curé of Saint-Aubin, to the committee of section Mutius Scoevola, Brumaire 20, year II.,"Like Brutus and Mutius Scoevola, I trample on the feelings with which I idolised my brother! O, truth, thou divinity of republicans, thou knowest the incorruptibility of may intentions!" (and so on for fifty-three lines). "These are my sentiments, I am fraternally, Osselin, minister of worship at Saint-Aubin."—P.S. "It was just as I was going to answer a call of nature that I learned this afflicting news." (He keeps up this bombast until words fail him, and finally, frightened to death, and his brain exhausted, he gives this postscript to show that he was not an accomplice.)]
2133 ([return])
[ A term denoting the substitution of ten instead of seven days as a division of time in the calendar, and forced into use during the Revolution.]
2134 ([return])
[ "Recuil de pieces authentiques servant à l'histoire de la revolution à Strasbourg," II., 299. (A district order.)]
2135 ([return])
[ Later, when Lenin and Stalin resurrected Jacobinism, they placed the headquarters of any subversive movement outside the country where it operated. (SR.)]
2136 ([return])
[ Thermidor refers to the a very important day and event during the French Revolution: the day Robespierre fell: Thermidor 9, year II, (July 27, 1794), Robespierre's fall, effective the 10, was prepared by his adversaries, Tallien, Barras, Fouché etc., essentially because they feared for their lives. Robespierre and 21 of his followers were executed on the evening of the 10th of Thermidor year II. (SR.).]
2137 ([return])
[ Ludovic Sciout, IV., 426. (Instructions sent by the Directory to the National Commissions, Frimaire, year II.)—Ibid., ch. X. to XVIII.]
2138 ([return])
[ Ibid., IV., 688.An order of the Director, Germinal 14, year VI.—"The municipal governments will designate special days in each decade for market days in their respective districts, and not allow, in any case, their ordinance to be set aside on the plea that the said market days would fall on a holiday. They will specially strive to break up all connection between the sales of fish and days of fasting designated on the old calendar. Every person exposing food or wares on sale in the markets on days other than those fixed by the municipal government will be prosecuted in the police court for obstructing a public thoroughfare."—The Thermidorians remain equally as anti-Catholic as their predecessors; only, they disavow open persecution and rely on slow pressure. (Moniteur, XIII., 523. Speech by Boissy d'Anglas, Ventôse 3, year II.) "Keep an eye on what you cannot hinder; regulate what you cannot prohibit.... It will not be long before these absurd dogmas, the offspring of fear and error, whose influence on the human mind has been so steadily destructive, will be known only to be despised.... It will not be long before the religion of Socrates, of Marcus Aurelius and Cicero will be the religion of the whole world.">[
2139 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVI., 646. (The King's trial.) Speech by Robespierre: "the right of punishing the tyrant and of dethroning him is one and the same thing."—Speech by Saint-Just: "Royalty is an eternal crime, against which every man has the right of taking up arms... To reign innocently is impossible!">[
2140 ([return])
[ Epigraph of Marat's journal: Ute readapt miseries, abet Fortuna superb is.]
2141 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXXII., 323. (Report of Saint-Just, Germinal 21, year II., and a decree of Germinal 26-29, Art. 4, 13, 15.)—Ibid., 315.]
2142 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, (Report of Saint-Just, October 10, 1793.) "That would be the only good they could do their country.... It would be no more than just for the people to reign over its oppressors in its turn, and that their pride should be bathed in the sweat of their brows.">[
2143 ([return])
[ Ibid., XXXI., 309. (Report of Saint-Just, Ventôse 8, year II.)]
2144 ([return])
[ Ibid., XXVI. 435. (Speech by Robespierre on the constitution, May 10, 1793.) "What were our usages and pretended laws other than a code of impertinence and baseness, where contempt of men was subject to a sort of tariff, and graduated according to regulations as odd as they were numerous? To despise and be despised, to cringe in order to rule, slaves and tyrants in turn, now kneeling before a master, now trampling the people under foot—such was the ambition of all of us, so long as we were men of birth or well educated men, whether common folks or fashionable folks, lawyers or financiers, pettifoggers or wearing swords."—Archives Nationales, F7, 31167. (Report of the observatory Chaumont, Nivôse 10, year II.)—"Boolean's effigy, placed in the college of Lisle, has been lowered to the statues of the saints, the latter being taken out of their niches. There is now no kind of distinction. Saints and authors are of the same class.">[
2145 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux., 296. ("Institutions" by Saint-Just.)—Meillan, "Mémoires," p. 17.—Anne Plumptre, "A narrative of three years' residence in France, from 1802 to 1805," II., 96. At Marseilles: "The two great crimes charged on those who doomed to destruction, were here as elsewhere, wealth and aristocracy... It had been decreed by the Terrorists that no person could have occasion for more than two hundred livres a year, and that no income should be permitted to exceed that sum.">[
2146 ([return])
[ Archives Nationales, F7, 4437. (Address of the people's club of Caisson (Gard), Messidor 7, year II.) "The Bourgeoisie, the merchants, the large land-owners have all the pretension of the ex-nobles. The law provides no means for opening the eyes of the common people in relation to these new tyrants. The club desires that the revolutionary tribunal should be empowered to condemn this proud class of individuals to a prompt partial confinement. The people would then see that they had committed a misdemeanor and would withdraw that sort of respect in which they hold them." A note in the hand-writing of Couthon: "Left to the decision of popular commissions.">[
2147 ([return])
[ Gouvernor Morris, in a letter of January 4, 1796, says that French capitalists have been financially ruined by assignats, and physically by the guillotine.—Buchez et Roux, XXX., 26. (Notes written by Robespierre in June, 1793.) "Internal dangers come from the bourgeois... who are our enemies? The vicious and the rich.">[
2148 ([return])
[ Narrative by M. Sylvester de Sacy (May 23, 1873): His father owned a farm bringing in four thousand francs per annum; the farmer offered him four thousand francs in assignats or a hog; M. de Sacy took the hog.]
2149 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXXI., 441. (Report by Cambon on the institution of the grand livre of public debt, August 15, 1793.)]
2150 ([return])
[ Ibid., XXXI., 311. Report by Saint-Just, February 26, 1794, and decree in accordance therewith, unanimously adopted. See, in particular, article 2.—Moniteur, 12 Ventôse, year II. (meeting of the Jacobin club, speech by Collot d'Herbois). "The Convention has declared that prisoners must prove that they were patriots from the 1st of May 1789. When the patriots and enemies of the Revolution shall be fully known, then the property of the former shall be inviolable and held sacred, while that of the latter will be confiscated for the benefit of the republic.">[
2151 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXVI., 455 (Session of the Jacobin Club, May 10, 1793, speech by Robespierre.)—Ibid., (Report by Saint-Just, Feb. 26, 1794.) "He who has shown himself an enemy of his country cannot be one of its proprietors. Only he has patrimonial rights who has helped to free it.">[
2152 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXXI., 93 and 130. (Speech by Robespierre on property, and the declaration of rights adopted by the Jacobin club.) Decree of Sept. 3, 1793 (articles 13 and 14).]
2153 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XXII., 719. (Report by Cambon, Frimaire 6, year III.) "At Bordeaux Raba has been sentenced to pay a fine of 1,200,000 francs, Pechotte to pay 500,000 francs, Martin-Martin to 300,000 francs."—Cf. Rodolphe Reuss, "Séligmann Alexandre ou les Tribulations d'un israélite de Strasbourg.">[
2154 ([return])
[ Ibid., XVIII., 486. (Report by Cambon, Frimaire 1, year II.) "The egotists who, some time ago, found it difficult to pay for the national domains they had acquired from the Republic, even in assignats, now bring us their gold... Collectors of the revenue who had buried their gold have come and offered to pay what they owe the nation in ingots of gold and silver. These have been refused, the Assembly having decreed the confiscation of these objects.">[
2155 ([return])
[ Decree of Brumaire 23, year II. On taxes and confiscations in the provinces see M. de Martel, "Etude sur Fouché et Pieces authentiques servant à l'histoire de la revolution à Strasbourg." And further on the details of this operation at Troyes.—Meillan, 90: "At Bordeaux, merchants were heavily taxed, not on account of their incivism, but on account of their wealth.">[
2156 ([return])
[ Decree of March 7-11, 1793.]
2157 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVIII., 274, decrees of Brumaire 4, and ibid, 305, decree of Brumaire 9, year II., establishing equal partition of inheritances with retroactive effect to July 14, 1789. Adulterous bastards are excepted. The reporter of the bill, Cambacèrés, laments this regrettable exception.]
2158 ([return])
[ Rights of inheritance allowed to the descendants of a deceased person who never enjoyed these rights, but who might have enjoyed them had he been living when they fell to him.—Tr.]
2159 ([return])
[ Fenet, "Travaux du Code civil." (Report by Cambacèrés on the Code civil, August 9, 1793). The spokesman for the committee that had framed the bill makes excuses for not having deprived the father of all the disposable portion. "The committee believed that such a clause would seriously violate our customs without being of any benefit to society or of any moral advantage. We assured ourselves, moreover, that there should always be a division of property." With respect to donations: "It is repugnant to all ideas of beneficence to allow donations to the rich. Nature is averse to the making of such gifts so long as our eyes dwell on misery and misfortune. These affecting considerations have determined us to fix a point, a sort of maximum, which prohibits gifts on the part of those who have reached that point.">[
2160 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XII., 730, (June 22, 1792), speech by Lamarque.—But this principle is encountered everywhere. "Equality, indeed, (is) the final aim of social art." (Condorcet, 'Tableau des progrès de l'esprit humain," II., 59.—"We desired," writes Baudot, "to apply to politics the equality which the Gospel awards to Christians." (Quinet, "Revolution Française, II., 407.)]
2161 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXXV, 296 (The words of Saint-Just.)—Moniteur, XVIII, 505 (Ordinance of the Paris Commune, Frimaire 3, year II). "Wealth and Poverty must alike disappear under the régime of equality.">[
2162 ([return])
[ Ib. XXXV, 296 ("Institutions" by Saint-Just). "A man is not made for trades, nor for a workhouse nor for an alms-house; all this is frightful."—Ibid., XXXI., 312. (Report of Saint-Just, Ventôse 8, year II.) "Let all Europe see that you will not allow a miserable man on French territory!... Happiness is a new idea in Europe.">[
2163 ([return])
[ Ib. XXXV, 296 ("Institutions" by Saint-Just.)]
2164 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XX, 444 ( Report by Barère, Floreal 22, year II). "Mendicity is incompatible with popular government.">[
2165 ([return])
[ Ib., XIX., 568. (Report by Saint-Just, Ventôse 8, year II.)]
2166 ([return])
[ Ib., XX, 448 (Rapport by Barère, Floreal 22).]
2167 ([return])
[ Ibid., XIX., 568. (Report by Saint-Just, Ventôse 8, and decree of Ventôse 13.) "The Committee of Public Safety will report on the means of indemnifying the unfortunate with property belonging to the enemies of the Revolution.">[
2168 ([return])
[ Ibid., XIX., 484. (Report by Barère, Ventôse 21, year II.)—Ibid., XX., 445. (Report by Barère, Floréal 22, year II.)—Decrees on public assistance, June 28, 1793, July 25, 1793, Frimaire 2, and Floréal 22, year II.)—this principle, moreover, was set forth in the Constitution of 1793. "Public help is a sacred obligation; society owes a subsistence to unfortunate citizens, whether by providing work for them, or by ensuring the means of existence to those who are not in a condition to work."—Archives Nationales, AF. II., 39. The character of this measure is very clearly expressed in the following circular of the Committee of Public Safety to its representatives on mission in the departments, Ventôse, year II. "A summary act was necessary to put the aristocracy down. The national Convention has struck the blow. Virtuous indigence had to recover the property which crime had encroached upon. The national Convention has proclaimed its rights. A general list of all prisoners should be sent to the Committee of General Security, charged with deciding on their fate. The Committee of Public Safety will receive the statement of the indigent in each commune so as to regulate what is due to them. Both these proceedings demand the utmost dispatch and should go together. It is necessary that terror and justice be brought to bear on all points at once. The Revolution is the work of the people and it is time they should have the benefit of it.">[
2169 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XX., 449. (Report by Barère, Floréal 22, year II.)]
2170 ([return])
[ Decree of April 2-5, 1793.]
2171 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVIII., 505. (Orders of Fouché and Collet d'Herbois, dated at Lyons and communicated to the commune of Paris, Frimaire 3, year II.)—De Martel, "Etude sur Fouché," 132. Orders of Fouché on his mission in the Nievre, Sept. 19, 1793. "There shall be established in each district town a Committee of Philanthropy, authorized to levy on the rich a tax proportionate to the number of the indigent.">[
2172 ([return])
[ Decree of April 2-5, 1793. "There shall be organized in each large commune a guard of citizens selected from the least fortunate. These citizens shall be armed and paid at the expense of the Republic.">[
2173 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XX., 449. (Report of Barère, Floréal 22, year II.)]
2174 ([return])
[ Ibid., XIX., 689. (Report by Saint-Just, Ventôse 23, year II.) "We spoke of happiness. It is not the happiness of Persepolis we have offered to you. It is that of Sparta or Athens in their best days, the happiness of virtue, that of comfort and moderation, the happiness which springs from the enjoyment of the necessary without the superfluous, the luxury of a cabin and of a field fertilized by your own hands. A cart, a thatched roof affording shelter from the frosts, a family safe from the lubricity of a robber—such is happiness!">[
2175 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXXI., 402. (Constitution of 1793.)]
2176 ([return])
[ Ibid. XXXV., 310. ("Institutions", by Saint-Just.)]
2177 ([return])
[ Ibid., XXVI., 93 and 131. (Speech by Robespierre on property, April 24, 1793, and declaration of rights adopted by the Jacobin Club.)—Mallet-Dupan, "Mémoires," I., 401. (Address of a deputation from Gard.) "Material wealth is no more the special property of any one member of the social body than base metal stamped as a circulating medium.">[
2178 ([return])
[ Moniteur, VIII., 452. (Speech by Hébert in the Jacobin Club, Brumaire 26, year II.) "Un Séjour en France de 1792 à 1795," p.218. (Amiens, Oct. 4, 1794.) "While waiting this morning at a shop door I overheard a beggar bargaining for a slice of pumpkin. Unable to agree on the price with the woman who kept the shop he pronounced her 'corrupted with aristocracy.' 'I defy you to prove it!' she replied. But, as she spoke, she turned pale and added, 'Your civism is beyond all question—but take your pumpkin.' 'Ah,' returned the beggar, 'what a good republican!'">[
2179 ([return])
[ Ibid., XVIII., 320. (Meeting of Brumaire 11, year II. Report by Barère.)—Meillan, 17. Already, before the 31st May: "The tribune resounded with charges against monopoly, every man being a monopolist who was not reduced to living on daily wages or on alms.">[
2180 ([return])
[ Decrees of July 26, 1793, Sept. 11 and 29; Brumaire 11, and Ventôse 6, year II.]
2181 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVIII., 359. "Brumaire 16, year II. Sentence of death of Pierre Gourdier, thirty-six years of age, stock-broker, resident in Paris, rue Bellefond, convicted of having monopolized and concealed in his house a large quantity of bread, in order to bread scarcity in the midst of abundance." He had gastritis and could eat nothing but panada made with toast, and the baker who furnished this gave him thirty pieces at a time (Wallon, II., 155).]
2182 ([return])
[ Journal of the debates of the Jacobin Club, No. 532, Brumaire 20, year II. (Plan of citizen Dupré, presented in the Convention by a deputation of the Arcis Club.)—Dauban, "Paris en 1794," p. 483 (a project similar to the former, presented to the Committee of Public Safety by the Jacobin Club of Montereau, Thermidor, year II.)]
2183 ([return])
[ These proposals should come to haunt western civilization for a long time. (SR.)]
2184 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXXV., 272. ("Institutions," by Saint-Just.)]
2185 ([return])
[ These ideas were still powerful even before Taine wrote these words in 1882. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations cites a declaration made by 47 anarchists on trial after their uprising in Lyons in 1870: "We wish, in a word, equality—equality in fact as corollary, or rather, as primordial condition of liberty. From each according to his faculties, to each according to his needs; that is what we wish sincerely and energetically.">[
2186 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXXI, 273, (Report by Robespierre, Pluviôse17, year II. (7 Feb. 1794).]
2187 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XIX (Rapport by Barère, Ventôse 21, an II). "You should detect and combat federalism in all your institutions, as your natural enemy....A grand central establishment for all the work of the Republic is an effective means against federalism."—Buchez et Roux, XXXI, 351, et XXXII, 316 (Rapports by Saint-Just, Ventôse 23 et Germinal 26, year II). "Immorality is a federalism in the civil state...Civil federalism, by isolating all parts of the state, has dried up abundance.">[
2188 ([return])
[ Decree of Germinal 26-29, year II. "Financial companies are and hereby remain suppressed. All bankers, commission merchants, and other persons, are forbidden to form any establishment of this order under any pretext or under any denomination.">[
2189 ([return])
[ "Memoires de Carnot," I., 278 (Report by Carnot). "That is not family life. If there are local privileges there will soon be individual privileges and local aristocracy will bring along in its train the aristocracy of inhabitants.">[
2190 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XIX., 683 (Rapport by Barère, Ventôse 21, year II).—This report should be read in full to comprehend the communistic and centralizing spirit of the Jacobins. (Undoubtedly Lenin, during his years in Paris, had read Taine's footnote and asked the national library for a copy of this rapport. SR.)]
2191 ([return])
[ Fenet, "Travaux du Code civil," 105 (Rapports by Cambacérès, August 9, 1793 and September 9, 1794).—Decrees of September 20, 1793 and Floréal 4, year II (On divorce).—Cf. "Institutions," by Saint-Just (Buchez et Roux, XXXV, 302). "A man and woman who love each other are married; if they have no children they may keep their relationship secret.">[
2192 ([return])
[ This article of the Jacobin program, like the others, has its practical result.—"At Paris, in the twenty-seven months after the promulgation of the law of September, 1792, the courts granted five thousand nine hundred and ninety-four divorces, and in year VI, the number of divorces exceeded the marriages." (Glasson, le Mariage civil et le Divorce, 51.)—"The number of foundlings which, in 1790, in France, did not exceed twenty-three thousand, is now (year X.) more than sixty-three thousand. "Statistique de la Sarthe," by Auvray, prefect, year, X.)—In the Lot-et-Garonne (Statistique, by Peyre, préfet, year X ), more than fifteen hundred foundlings are counted: "this extraordinary number increased during the Revolution through the too easy admission of foundlings into the asylums, through the temporary sojourning of soldiers in their homes, through the disturbance of every moral and religious principle."—"It is not rare to find children of thirteen and fourteen talking and acting in a way that would have formerly disgraced a young man of twenty." (Moselle, Analyse, by Ferrière.)—"The children of workmen are idle and insubordinate; some indulge in the most shameful conduct against their parents;" others try stealing and use the coarsest language." (Meurthe, Statistique, by Marquis, préfet.)—Cf. Anne Plumptre (A Narrative of three years' residence in France from 1802 to 1805, I. 436). "You would not believe it, Madame, said a gardener to her at Nimes, that during the Revolution we dared not scold our children for their faults. Those who called themselves patriots regarded it as against the fundamental principles of liberty to correct children. This made them so unruly that, very often, when a parent presumed to scold its child the latter would tell him to mind his business, adding, 'we are free and equal, the Republic is our only father and mother; if you are not satisfied, I am. Go where you like it better.' Children are still saucy. It will take a good many years to bring them back to minding.']
2193 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXXII., 364 (Report by Robespierre, Floréal 8, year II.)]
2194 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXXII., 385—(Address of a Jacobin deputation to the Convention, Floréal 27, year II.)—At Bayeux, the young girl who represented Liberty, had the following inscription on her breast or back: "Do not make of me an instrument of licentiousness." (Gustave Flaubert, family souvenirs.)]
2195 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXXI., 415. (Report by Fabre d'Eglantine, October 6, 1793.)—(Grégoire, "Memoires," I., 341.) "The new calendar was invented by Romme in order to get rid of Sunday. This was his object; he admitted it to me.">[
2196 ([return])
[ Ibid., XXXII., 274. (Report by Robespierre, Floréal 18, year II.) "National Festivals form an essential part of public education.... A system of national festivals is the most powerful means of regeneration.">[
2197 ([return])
[ Ibid., XXXVIII., 335. Marat's heart, placed on a table in the Cordéliers Club, was an object of religious reverence.—(Grégoire, "Mémoires," I., 341.) "In some schools the pupils were obliged to make the sign of the cross at the names of Marat, Lazowski, etc.">[
2198 ([return])
[ Comte de Martel, "Étude sur Fouché," 137. Fête at Nevers, on the inaguration of a bust of Brutus.—Ibid., 222, civic festival at Nevers in honor of valor and morals.—Dauban, "Paris en 1794." Programme of the fête of the supreme Being at Sceaux.]
2199 ([return])
[ An expression by Rabaut Saint-Etienne.]
21100 ([return])
[ Ibid., XXXII., 373 (Report by Robespierre, Floréal 15, year II.)—Danton had expressed precisely the same opinion, supported by the same arguments, at the meeting of Frimaire 22, year II. (Moniteur, XVIII, 654.) "Children first belong to the Republic before belonging to their parents. Who will assure me that these children, inspired by parental egoism, will not become dangerous to the Republic? What do we care for the ideas of an individual alongside of national ideas?... Who among us does not know the danger of this constant isolation? It is in the national schools that the child must suck republican milk! .... The Republic is one and indivisible. Public instruction must likewise relate to this center of unity.">[
21101 ([return])
[ Decree of Vendémaire 30 and Brumaire 7, year II.—Cf. Sauzay, VI., 252, on the application of this decree in the provinces.]
21102 ([return])
[ Albert Duruy, 2L 'Instruction publique et la Revolution,2 164, to 172' (extracts from various republican spelling-books and catechisms).—Decree of Frimaire 29, year II., section I., art. I, 83; section II., art. 2; section III., arts. 6 and 9.]
21103 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVIII., 653. (Meeting of Frimaire 22, speech by Bouquir, reporter.)]
21104 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVIII., 351-359. (Meeting of Brumaire 15, year II., report by Chénier.) "You have made laws—create habits.... You can apply to the public instruction of the nation the same course that Rousseau follows in 'Emile.' ">[
21105 ([return])
[ The words of Bouquier, reporter. (Meeting of Frimaire 22, year II.)]
21106 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXIV, 57 (Plan by Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, read by Robespierre at the Convention, July 13, 1793.)—Ibid., 35. (Draft of a decree by the same hand.)]
21107 ([return])
[ Ibid., XXX., 229. ("Institutions," by Saint-Just.)]
21108 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXXI., 261. (Meeting of Nivose 17.) On the committee presenting the final draft of the decrees on public instruction the Convention adopts the following article: "All boys who, on leaving the primary schools of instruction, do not devote themselves to tillage, will be obliged to learn some science, art or occupation useful to society. Otherwise, on reaching twenty, they will be deprived of citizens' rights for ten years, and the same penalty will be laid on their father, mother, tutor or guardian.">[
21109 ([return])
[ Decree of Prairial 13, year II.]
21110 ([return])
[ Langlois, "Souvenirs de l'Ecole de Mars.">[
21111 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXXII., 355. (Report by Robespierre, Floréal 18, year II.)]
21112 ([return])
[ Moniteur, XVIII., 326. (Meeting of the Commune, Brumaire 11, year II.) the commissary announces that, at Fontainebleau and other places, "he has established the system of equality in the prisons and places of confinement, where the rich and the poor partake of the same food."—Ibid., 210. (Meeting of the Jacobins, Vendémiaire 29, year II. Speech by Laplance on his mission to Gers.) "Priests had every comfort in their secluded retreats; the sans-culottes in the prisons slept on straw. The former provided me with mattresses for the latter."—Ibid., XVIII., 445. (Meeting of the convention, Brumaire 26, year II.) "The Convention decrees that the food of persons kept in places of confinement shall be simple and the same for all, the rich paying for the poor.">[
21113 ([return])
[ Archives Nationales. (AF. II., 37, order of Lequinio, Saintes, Nivose 1, year II.) "Citizens generally in all communes, are requested to celebrate the day of the decade by a fraternal banquet which, served without luxury or display... will render the man bowed down with fatique insensible to his forlorn condition; which will fill the soul of the poor and unfortunate with the sentiment of social equality and raise man up to the full sense of his dignity; which will suppress with the rich man the slightest feeling of pride and extinguish in the public functionary all germs of haughtiness and aristocracy.">[
21114 ([return])
[ Archives Nationales, AF. II., ii., 48 (Act of Floréal 25, year II.) "the Committee of Public Safety request David, representative of the people, to present his views and plans in relation to modifying the present national costume, so as to render it appropriate to republican habits and the character of the Revolution."—Ibid., (Act of Prairial 5, year II.) for engraving and coloring twenty thousand impressions of the design for a civil uniform, and six thousand impressions for the three designs for a military, judicial and legislative uniform.]
21115 ([return])
[ An identical change took, strangely enough and as caused by some hidden force, place in Denmark in the seventies. (SR.)]
21116 ([return])
[ This is now the case in the entire Western 'democratic' sphere, in newspapers, schools, and on television. (SR.)]
21117 ([return])
[ Ibid, XXXI., 271. (Report by Robespierre, Pluviose 1, year II.) "This sublime principle supposes a preference for public interests over all private interests; from which it follows that the love of country supposes again, or produces, all the virtues." "As the essence of a republic or of democracy is equality, it follows that love of country necessarily comprises a love of equality." "The soul of the Republic is virtue, equality."—Lavalette, "Memoirs," I., 254. (Narrated by Madame Lavalette.) She was compelled to attend public festivals, and, every month, the patriotic processions. "I was rudely treated by my associates, the low women of the quarter; the daughter of an emigré, of a marquis, or of an imprisoned mother, ought not to be allowed the honor of their company;.... it was all wrong that she was not made an apprentice.... Hortense de Beauharnais was apprenticed to her mother's seamstress, while Eugene was put with a carpenter in the Faubourg St. Germain." The prevailing dogmatism has a singular effect with simple-minded people. (Archives Nationals, AF. II., 135. petition of Ursule Riesler, servant to citizen Estreich and arrested along with him, addressed to Garneri, agent of the Committee of Public Safety. She begs citizen Garnerin to interest himself in obtaining her freedom. She will devote her life to praying to the Supreme Being for him, since he will redeem her life. He is to furnish her, moreover, with the means for espousing a future husband, a genuine republican, by who she is pregnant, and who would not allow her to entertain any idea of fanatical capers.]
CHAPTER II. REACTIONARY CONCEPT OF THE STATE.
I. Reactionary concept of the State.
Reactionary concept of the State.—Analogy between this idea
of the State and that of antiquity.—Difference between
antique and modern society.—Changed circumstances.
The Jacobin theory can then be summarized in the following points:
* The speculative creation of a curtailed type of human being.
* An effort to adapt the living man to this type.
* The interference of public authority in every branch of public endeavor.
* Constraints put upon labor, trade and property, upon the family and education, upon worship, habits, customs and sentiments.
* The sacrifice of the individual to the community.
* The omnipotence of the State.
No theory could be more reactionary since it moves modern man back to a type of society which he, eighteen centuries ago, had already passed through and left behind.
During the historical era proceeding our own, and especially in the old Greek or Latin cities, in Rome or Sparta, which the Jacobins take for their models,[2201] human society was shaped after the pattern of an army or convent. In a convent as in an army, one idea, absorbing and unique, predominates:
* The aim of the monk is to please God at any sacrifice.
* The soldier makes every sacrifice to obtain a victory.
Accordingly, each renounces every other desire and entirely abandons himself, the monk to his rules and the soldier to his drill. In like manner, in the antique world, two preoccupations were of supreme importance. In the first place, the city had its gods who were both its founders and protectors: it was therefore obliged to worship these in the most reverent and particular manner; otherwise, they abandoned it. The neglect of any insignificant rite might offend them and ruin it. In the second place, there was incessant warfare, and the spoils of war were atrocious; on a city being taken every citizen might expect to be killed or maimed, or sold at auction, and see his children and wife sold to the highest bidder.[2202] In short, the antique city, with its acropolis of temples and its fortified citadel surrounded by implacable and threatening enemies, resembles for us the institution of the Knights of St. John on their rocks at Rhodes or Malta, a religious and military confraternity encamped around a church.—Liberty, under such conditions, is out of the question: public convictions are too imperious; public danger is too great. With this pressure upon him, and thus hampered, the individual gives himself up to the community, which takes full possession of him, because, to maintain its own existence, it needs the whole man. Henceforth, no one may develop apart and for himself; no one may act or think except within fixed lines. The type of Man is distinctly and clearly marked out, if not logically at least traditionally; each life, as well as each portion of each life must conform to this type; otherwise public security is compromised: any falling off in gymnastic education weakens the army; passing the images of the gods and neglecting the usual libation draws down celestial vengeance on the city. Consequently, to prevent all deviations, the State, absolute master, exercises unlimited jurisdiction; no freedom whatever is left to the individual, no portion of himself is reserved to himself, no sheltered corner against the strong hand of public force, neither his possessions, his children, his personality, his opinions or his conscience.[2203] If, on voting days, he shares in the sovereignty, he is subject all the rest of the year, even to his private sentiments. Rome, to serve these ends, had two censors. One of the archons of Athens was inquisitor of the faith. Socrates was put to death for not believing in the gods in which the city believed.[2204]—In reality, not only in Greece and in Rome, but in Egypt, in China, in India, in Persia, in Judea, in Mexico, in Peru, during the first stages of civilization,[2205] the principle of human communities is still that of gregarious animals: the individual belongs to his community the same as the bee to its hive and the ant to its ant-hill; he is simply an organ within an organism. Under a variety of structures and in diverse applications authoritative socialism alone prevails.
Just the opposite in modern society; what was once the rule has now become the exception; the antique system survives only in temporary associations, like that of an army, or in special associations, as in a convent. Gradually, the individual has liberated himself, and century after century, he has extended his domain and the two chains which once bound him fast to the community, have snapped or been lightened.
In the first place, public power has ceased to consist of a militia protecting a cult. In the beginning, through the institution of Christianity, civil society and religious society have become two distinct empires, Christ himself having separated the two jurisdictions;
"Render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar's, and unto God the things that are God's."
Additionally, through the rise of Protestantism, the great Church is split into numerous sects which, unable to destroy each other, have been so compelled to live together and the State, even when preferring one of them, has found it necessary to tolerate the others. Finally, through the development of Protestantism, philosophy and the sciences, speculative beliefs have multiplied. There are almost as many faiths now-a-days as there are thinking men, and, as thinking men are becoming daily more numerous, opinions are daily becoming more numerous. So should the State try to impose any one of these on society, this would excite opposition from an infinity of others; hence the wisdom in governing is found, first, in remaining neutral, and, next, in acknowledging that it is not qualified to interfere.
In the second place, war has become less frequent and less destructive because men have not so many motives for waging it, nor the same motives to push it to the same extremes. Formerly, war was the main source of wealth; through victories Man acquired slaves, subjects and tributaries; he turned these to the best account; he leisurely enjoyed their forced labor. Nothing of this kind is seen now-a-days; people no longer think of providing themselves human cattle; they have discovered that, of all animals, these are the most troublesome, the least productive, and the most dangerous. Comforts and security are obtained much more readily through free labor and machinery; the great object no is not to conquer, but to produce and interchange. Every day, man, pressing forward more eagerly in civil careers, is less disposed to put up with any obstacle that interferes with his aims; if he still consents to be a soldier it is not to become an invader, but to provide against invasion. Meanwhile, war has become more scientific and, through the complications of its machinery, more costly; the State can no longer call out and enlist for life every able-bodied man without ruining itself, nor put too many obstacles in the way of the free industry which, through taxation, provides for its expenses; however short-sighted the State may be, it consults civil interests, even in its military interest.—Thus, of the two nets in which it has enveloped all human activity, one is rent asunder and the other has slackened its meshes. There is no longer any reason for making the community omnipotent; the individual need not alienate himself entirely; he may, without inconvenience, reserve to himself a part of himself, and, if now called upon to sign a social contract, you may be sure that he would make this reservation.
II. Changed minds.
Changed minds.—Conscience and its Christian origin.—Honor
and its feudal origin.—The individual of to-day refuses to
surrender himself entirely.—His motives.—Additional
motives in modern democracy.—Character of the elective
process and the quality of the representative.
And so have not only outward circumstances changed, but the very human attitudes are now different. In the mind of modern man a feeling, distasteful to the antique pact, has evolved.—Undoubtedly, in extreme cases and under the pressure of brutal necessity I may, momentarily, sign a blank check. But, never, if I understand what I am doing, will I sign away in good faith the complete and permanent abandonment of myself: it would be against conscience and against honor, which two possessions are not to be alienated. My honor and my conscience are not to go out of my keeping; I am their sole guardian and depositary; I would not even entrust them to my father.—Both these terms are recent and express two conceptions unknown to the ancients,[2206] both being of profound import and of infinite reach. Through them, like a bud separated from its stem and taking root apart, the individual has separated himself from the primitive body, clan, family, caste or city in which he has lived indistinguishable and lost in the crowd; he has ceased to be an organ and appendage; he has become a personality.—The first of these concepts is of Christian origin the second of feudal origin; both, following each other and conjoined, measure the enormous distance which separates an antique soul from a modern soul.[2207]
Alone, in the presence of God, the Christian has felt melting, like wax, all the ties binding him to his group; this because he is in front of the Great Judge, and because this infallible judge sees all souls as they are, not confusedly and in masses, but clearly, each by itself. At the bar of His tribunal no one is answerable for another; each answers for himself alone; one is responsible only for one's own acts. But those acts are of infinite consequence, for the soul, redeemed by the blood of a God, is of immeasurable value; hence, according as it has or has not profited by the divine sacrifice, so will the reward or punishment be infinite; at the final judgment, an eternity of torment or bliss opens before it. All other interests vanish alongside of a vision of such vastness. Thenceforth, righteousness is the most serious of all aims, not in the eyes of man, but of God and again, day after day, the soul renews within itself that tragic questioning in which the Judge interrogates and the sinner responds.—Through this dialogue, which has been going on for eighteen centuries, and which is yet to continue, conscience has grown more and more sensitive, and man has conceived the idea of absolute justice. Whether this is vested in an all-powerful master, or whether it is a self-existent truth, like mathematical truths, in no way diminishes its sacredness nor, consequently, from its authority. It commands with a superior voice and its commands must be obeyed, irrespective of cost: there are strict duties to which every man is rigorously bound. No pledge may relieve him of these duties; if not fulfilled because he has given contrary pledges he is no less culpable on this account, and besides, he is culpable for having pledged himself; the pledging of himself to crimes was in itself a crime. His fault thus appears to himself twofold, and the inward prick galls him twice instead of once. Hence, the more sensitive the conscience, the more loath it is to give up; it rejects any promise which may lead to wrong-doing, and refuses to give to give others any right of imposing remorse.
At the same time another sentiment has arisen, not less valuable, but hardier, more energetic, more human and more effective. On his own in his stronghold, the feudal chieftain, at the head of his band, could depend on nobody but himself, for a public force did not then exist. It was necessary that he should protect himself, and, indeed, over-protect himself. Whoever, in the anarchical and military society in which he lived, allowed the slightest encroachment, or left unpunished the slightest approach to insult, was regarded as weak or craven and at once became a prey; one had to be proud-spirited, if not, one risked death. This was not difficult either. Sole proprietor and nearly absolute sovereign, with neither equals or peers on his domain, here he was unique being, superior and incomparable to every one else.[2208] On that subject revolved his long monologue during his hours of gloomy solitude, which soliloquy has lasted for nine centuries.[2209] Thus in his own eyes, his person and all that depends on him are inviolable; rather than tolerate the slightest infringement on his prerogatives he will dare all and sacrifice all.[2210] A sensitive pride (orgueil exalté) is the best of sentinels to protect a right; for, not only does it mount guard over the right to preserve it, but, again, and especially, for its own satisfaction; the imagination has conceived a personality appropriate for his rank, and this character the man imposes on himself as his role. Henceforth, he not only forces the respect of others, but he respects himself; he possesses the sentiment of honor, a generous self-esteem which makes him regard himself as noble and incapable of doing anything mean. In discriminating between his actions, he may err; fashion or vanity may sometimes lead him too far, or lead him astray, either on the path of recklessness or on that of puerility; his point of honor may be fixed in the wrong direction. But, in sum, and thanks to this being a fixed point, he will maintain himself erect even under an absolute monarchy, under a Philip II. in Spain, under a Louis XIV. in France, under a Frederick II. in Prussia. From the feudal baron or gentleman of the court to the modern gentleman, this tradition persists and descends from story to story down to lowest social substratum: to-day, every man of spirit, the bourgeois, the peasant, the workman, has his point of honor like the noble. He likewise, in spite of the social encroachments that gain on him, reserves to himself his private nook, a sort of moral stronghold wherein he preserves his faiths, his opinions, his affections, his obligations as son, husband and father; it is the sacred treasury of his innermost being. This stronghold belongs to him alone; no one, even in the name of the public, has a right to enter it; to surrender it would be cowardice, rather than give up its keys he would die in the breach;[2211] when this militant sentiment of honor is enlisted on the side of conscience it becomes virtue itself.[2212]—Such are, in these days, (1870) the two central themes of our European morality.[2213] Through the former the individual recognizes duties from which nothing can exempt him; through the latter, he claims rights of which nothing can deprive him: our civilization has vegetated from these two roots, and still vegetates. Consider the depth and the extent of the historical soil in which they penetrate, and you may judge of their vigor. Consider the height and unlimited growth of the trees which they nourish, and you may judge of their healthiness. Everywhere else, one or other having failed, in China, in the Roman Empire, in Islam, the sap has dried downward and the tree has become stunted, or has fallen.... It is the modern man, who is neither Chinese, nor antique, nor Moslem, nor Negro, nor savage, the man formed by Christian education and taking refuge in his conscience as in a sanctuary, the man formed by feudal education and entrenched behind his honor as in a fortress, whose sanctuary and stronghold the new social contract bids him surrender.
Now, in this democracy founded on the preponderance of numbers, into whose hands am I required to make this surrender?—Theoretically, to the community, that is to say, to a crowd in which an anonymous impulse is the substitute for individual judgment; in which action becomes impersonal because it is collective; in which nobody acknowledges responsibility; in which I am borne along like a grain of sand in a whirlwind; in which all sorts of outrages are condoned beforehand for reasons of state: practically, to the plurality of voices counted by heads, to a majority which, over-excited by the struggle for mastery, will abuse its victory and wrong the minority to which I may belong; to a provisional majority which, sooner or later, will be replaced by another, so that if I am to-day oppressor I am sure of being oppressed to-morrow; still more particularly, to six or seven hundred representatives, among who I am called upon to choose but one. To elect this unique mandatory I have but one vote among ten thousand; and in helping to elect him I am only the ten-thousandth; I do not even count for a ten-thousandth in electing the others. And it is these six or seven hundred strangers to me to who I give full power to decide for me—note the expression full power—which means unlimited power, not alone over my possessions and life, but, again, over my conscience, with all its powers combined; that is to say, with powers much more extensive than those I confer separately on ten persons in whom I place the most confidence—to my legal adviser who looks after my fortune, to the teacher of my children, to the physician who cares for my health, to the confessor who directs my conscience, to friends who are to serve as executors of my last will and testament, to seconds in a duel who decide on my life, on the was of my blood and who guard my honor. Without reference to the deplorable farce, so often played around the ballot-box, or to the forced and distorted elections which put a contrary interpretation on public sentiment, or to the official lies by which, at this very moment, a few fanatics and madmen, who represent nobody but themselves, assume to represent the nation,[2214] measure what degree of confidence I may have, even after honest elections, in mandatories who are thus chosen! Frequently, I have voted for the defeated candidate; in which case I am represented by the other who I did not want for a representative. In voting for the elected candidate, I did it because I knew of no better one, and because his opponent seemed to me worse. I have only seen him one time out of four and then fleetingly, at odd moment; I scarcely knew more of him than the color of his coat, the tone of his voice, and the way he has of thumping his breast. All I know of him is through his "platform," vague and declamatory, through editorials, and through drawing-room, coffee-house, or street gossip. His title to my confidence is of the flimsiest and shallowest kind; there is nothing to substantiate to me his integrity or competency; he has no diploma, and no one to endorse him as has a private tutor; he has no guarantee from the society to which he belongs, like the physician, the priest or the lawyer. With references as poor as these I should hesitate to recruit him even as a domestic. And all the more because the class from which I am obliged to take him is almost always that of politicians, a suspicious class, especially in countries in which universal suffrage prevails. This class is not recruited among the most independent, the ablest, and the most honest, but among voluble, scheming men, zealous charlatans, who for want of perseverance, having failed in private careers, in situations where one is watched too closely and too nicely weighed in the balance, have selected roles in which the want of scrupulousness and discretion is a force instead of a weakness; to their indelicacy and impudence the doors of a public career stand wide open.—Such is the august personage into whose hands, according to the theory, I am called upon to surrender my will, my will in full; certainly, if self-renunciation were necessary, I should risk less in giving myself up to a king or to an aristocracy, even hereditary; for then would my representatives be at least recommended by their evident rank and their probable competency.—Democracy, in its nature and composition, is a system in which the individual awards to his representatives the least trust and deference; hence, it is the system in which he should entrust them with the least power. Conscience and honor everywhere enjoin a man to retain for himself some portion of his independence; but nowhere is there so little be ceded. If a modern constitution ought to clearly define and limit the domain of the State, it is in respect of contemporary democracy that it ought to be the most restrictive.
III. Origin and nature of the modern State.
Origin and nature of the modern State.—Its functions,
rights and limits.
Let us try to define these limits.—After the turmoil of invasions and conquest, at the height of social disintegration, amidst the combats daily occurring between private parties, there arose in every European community a public force, which force, lasting for centuries, still persists to our day. How it was organized, through what early stages of violence it passed, through what accidents and struggles, and into whose hands it is now entrusted, whether temporarily or forever, whatever the laws of its transmission, whether by inheritance or election, is of secondary importance; the main thing is its functions and their mode of operation. It is essentially a mighty sword, drawn from its scabbard and uplifted over the smaller blades around it, with which private individuals once cut each others' throats. Menaced by it, the smaller blades repose in their scabbards; they have become inert, useless, and, finally rusty; with few exceptions, everybody save malefactors, has now lost both the habit and the desire to use them, so that, henceforth, in this pacified society, the public sword is so formidable that all private resistance vanishes the moment it flashes.—This sword is forged out of two interests: it was necessary to have one of its magnitude, first, against similar blades brandished by other communities on the frontier, and next, against the smaller blades which bad passions are always sharpening in the interior. People demanded protection against outside enemies and inside ruffians and murderers, and, slowly and painfully, after much groping and much re-tempering, the agreement between hereditary forces has fashioned the sole arm which is capable of protecting lives and property with any degree of success.—So long as it does no more I am indebted to the State which holds the hilt: it gives me a security which, without it, I could not have enjoyed. In return for this security I owe it, for my quota, the means for keeping this weapon in good condition: he who enjoys a service is under an obligation to pay for it. Accordingly, there is between the State and myself, if not an express contract, at least a tacit understanding equivalent to that which binds a child to its parent, a believer to his church, and, on both sides, this mutual understanding is clear and precise. The state engages to look after my security within and without; I engage to furnish the means for so doing, which means consist of my respect and gratitude, my zeal as a citizen, my services as a conscript, my contributions as a tax-payer, in short, whatever is necessary for the maintenance of an army, a navy, a diplomatic organization, civil and criminal courts, a militia and police, central and local administrations, in short, a harmonious set of organs of which my obedience and loyalty constitute the food, the substance and the blood. This loyalty and obedience, whatever I am, whether rich or poor, Catholic, Protestant, Jew or free-thinker, royalist or republican, individualist or socialist, upon my honor and in my conscience I owe. This because I have received the equivalent; I am delighted that I am not vanquished, assassinated, or robbed. I reimburse the State, exactly but not more that which it has spent on equipment and personnel for keeping down brutal cupidity, greedy appetites, deadly fanaticism, the entire howling pack of passions and desires of which, sooner or later, I might become the prey, were it not constantly to extend over me its vigilant protection. When it demands its outlay of me it is not my property which it takes away, but its own property, which it collects and, in this light, it may legitimately force me to pay.—On condition, however, that it does not exact more than my liabilities, and this it does when it oversteps its original engagements;
1. when it undertakes some extra material or moral work that I do not ask for;
2. when it constitutes itself sectarian, moralist, philanthropist, or pedagogue;
3. when it strives to propagate within its borders, or outside of them, any religious or philosophic dogma, or any special political or social system.
For then, it adds a new article to the primitive pact, for which article there is not the same unanimous and assured assent that existed for the pact. We are all willing to be secured against violence and fraud; outside of this, and on almost any other point, there are divergent wills. I have my own religion, my own opinions, my habits, my customs, my peculiar views of life and way of regarding the universe; now, this is just what constitutes my personality, what honor and conscience forbid me to alienate, and which the State has promised me to protect. Consequently, when, through its additional article, it attempts to regulate these in a certain way, if that way is not my way, it fails to fulfill its primordial engagement and, instead of protecting me, it oppresses me. Even if it should have the support of a majority, even if all voters, less one, should agree to entrusting it with this supererogatory function, were there only one dissenter, he would be wronged, and in two ways.—
First of all, and in any event, the State, to fulfill its new tasks, exacts from him an extra amount of subsidy and service; for, every supplementary work brings along with it supplementary expenses; the budget is overburdened when the State takes upon itself the procuring of work for laborers or employment for artists, the maintenance of any particular industrial or commercial enterprise, the giving of alms, and the furnishing of education. To an expenditure of money add an expenditure of lives, should it enter upon a war of generosity or of propaganda. Now, to all these expenditures that it does not approve of, the minority contributes as well as the majority which does approve of them; so much the worse for the conscript and the tax-payer if they belong to the dissatisfied group. Like it or not, the collector puts his hand in the tax-payer's pocket, and the sergeant lays his hand on the conscript's collar.—
In the second place, and in many circumstances, not only does the State unjustly take more than its due, but it uses the money it has extorted from me to apply unjustly new constraints against me. Such is the case,
* when it imposes on me its theology or philosophy;
* when it prescribes for me, or interdicts, a cult;
* when it assumes to regulate my ways and habits,
* when it assumes to limit my labor or expenditure,
* when it assumes to direct the education of my children,
* when it assumes to fix the prices of my wares or the rate of my wages.
For then, to enforce its commands and prohibitions, it enacts light or serious penalties against the recalcitrant, all the way from political or civil incapacity to fines, imprisonment, exile and the guillotine. In other words, the money I do not owe it, and of which it robs me, pays for the persecution which it inflicts upon me; I am reduced to paying out of my own purse the wages of my inquisitors, my jailer and my executioner. A more glaring oppression could not be imagined!—Let us watch out for the encroachments of the State and not allow it to become anything more than a watch-dog. Whilst the teeth and nails of other guests in the household have been losing their sharpness, its fangs have become formidable; it is now colossal and it alone still keeps up the practice of fighting. Let us supply it with nourishment against wolves; but never let it touch peaceable folks around the table. Appetite grows by eating; it would soon become a wolf itself, and the most ravenous wolf inside the fold. The important thing is to keep a chain around its neck and confine it within its own enclosure.
IV. The state is tempted to encroach.
The state is tempted to encroach.—Precedents and reasons
for its pretensions.
Let us go around the fold, which is an extensive one, and, through its extensions, reach into almost every nook of private life.—Each private domain, indeed, physical or moral, offers temptations for its neighbors to trespass on it, and, to keep this intact, demands the superior intervention of a third party. To acquire, to possess, to sell, to give, to bequeath, to contract between husband and wife, father, mother or child, between master or domestic, employer or employee, each act and each situation, involves rights limited by contiguous and adverse rights, and it is the State which sets up the boundary between them. Not that it creates this boundary; but, that this may be recognized, it draws the line and therefore enacts civil laws which it applies through its courts and gendarmes in such a way as to secure to each individual what belongs to him. The State stands, accordingly, as regulator and controller, not alone of private possessions, but also of the family and of domestic life; its authority is thus legitimately introduced into that reserved circle in which the individual will has entrenched itself, and, as is the habit of all great powers, once the circle is invaded, its tendency is to occupy it fully and entirely.—To this end, it invokes a new principle. Constituted as a moral personality, the same as a church, university, or charitable or scientific body, is not the State bound, like every corporate body that is to last for ages, to extend its vision far and near and prefer to private interests, which are only life-interests, the common interest (l'intérêt commun) which is eternal? Is not this the superior end to which all others should be subordinated, and must this interest, which is supreme over all, be sacrificed to two troublesome instincts which are often unreasonable and sometimes dangerous; to conscience, which overflows in mystic madness, and to honor, which may lead to strife even to murderous duels?—Certainly not, and first of all when, in its grandest works, the State, as legislator, regulates marriages, inheritances, and testaments, then it is not respect for the will of individuals which solely guides it; it does not content itself with obliging everybody to pay his debts, including even those which are tacit, involuntary and innate; it takes into account the public interest; it calculates remote probabilities, future contingencies, all results singly and collectively. Manifestly, in allowing or forbidding divorce, in extending or restricting what a man may dispose of by testament, in favoring or interdicting substitutions, it is chiefly in view of some political, economical or social advantage, either to refine or consolidate the union of the sexes, to implant in the family habits of discipline or sentiments of affection, to excite in children an initiatory spirit, or one of concord, to prepare for the nation a staff of natural chieftains, or an army of small proprietors, and always authorized by the universal assent. Moreover, and always with this universal assent, it does other things outside the task originally assigned to it, and nobody finds that it usurps when,
* it coins money,
* it regulates weights and measures,
* it establishes quarantines,
* on condition of an indemnity, it expropriates private property for public utility,
* it builds lighthouses, harbors, dikes, canals, roads,
* it defrays the cost of scientific expeditions,
* it founds museums and public libraries;
* at times, toleration is shown for its support of universities, schools, churches, and theaters, and, to justify fresh drafts on private purses for such objects, no reason is assigned for it but the common interest. (l'intérêt commun)—Why should it not, in like manner, take upon itself every enterprise for the benefit of all? Why should it hesitate in commanding the execution of every work advantageous to the community, and why abstain from forbidding every harmful work? Now please note that in human society every act or omission, even the most concealed or private, is either a loss or a gain to society. So if I neglect to take care of my property or of my health, of my intellect or of my soul, I undermine or weaken in my person a member of the community which can only be rich, healthy and strong through the wealth, health and strength of his fellow members, so that, from this point of view, my private actions are all public benefits or public injuries. Why then, from this point of view, should the State scruple about prescribing some of these to me and forbidding others? Why, in order to better exercise this right, and better fulfill this obligation, should it not constitute itself the universal contractor for labor, and the universal distributor of productions? Why should it not become the sole agriculturist, manufacturer and merchant, the unique proprietor and administrator of all France?—Precisely because this would be opposed to the common weal (l'intérêt de tous, the interest of everyone)[2215]. Here the second principle, that advanced against individual independence, operates inversely, and, instead of being an adversary, it becomes a champion. Far from setting the State free, it puts another chain around its neck, and thus strengthens the fence within which modern conscience and modern honor have confined the public guardian.
V. Direct common interest.
Direct common interest.—This consists in the absence of
constraint.—Two reasons in favor of freedom of action.—
Character, in general, of the individual man.—Modern
complication.
In what, indeed, does the common weal (l'intérêt de tous, the interest of everyone) consist?—In the interest of each person, while that which interests each person is the things of which the possession is agreeable and deprivation painful. The whole world would in vain gainsay this point; every sensation is personal. My suffering and my enjoyments are not to be contested any more than my inclination for objects which procure me the one, and my dislike of objects which procure me the other. There is, therefore, no arbitrary definition of each one's particular interest; this exists as a fact independently of the legislator; all that remains is to show what this interest is, and what each individual prefers. Preferences vary according to race, time, place and circumstance. Among the possessions which are ever desirable and the privation of which is ever dreaded, there is one, however, which, directly desired, and for itself, becomes, through the progress of civilization, more and more cherished, and of which the privation becomes, through the progress of civilization, more and more grievous. That is the disposition of one's self, the full ownership of one's body and property, the faculty of thinking, believing and worshipping as one pleases, of associating with others, of acting separately or along with others, in all senses and without hindrance; in short, one's liberty. That this liberty may as extensive as possible is, in all times, one of man's great needs, and, in our days, it is his greatest need. There are two reasons for this, one natural and the other historical.—
By nature Man is an individual, that is to say a small distinct world in himself, a center apart in an enclosed circle, a detached organism complete in itself and which suffers when his spontaneous inclinations are frustrated by the intervention of an outside force.
The passage of time has made him a complicated organism, upon which three or four religions, five or six civilizations, thirty centuries of rich culture have left their imprint; in which its acquisitions are combined together, wherein inherited qualities are crossbred, wherein special traits have accumulated in such a way as to produce the most original and the most sensitive of beings. As civilization increases, so does his complexity: with the result that man's originality strengthens and his sensitivity become keener; from which it follows that the more civilized he becomes, the greater his repugnance to constraint and uniformity.
At the present day, (1880), each of us is the terminal and peculiar product of a vast elaboration of which the diverse stages occur in this order but once, a plant unique of its species, a solitary individual of superior and finer essence which, with its own inward structure and its own inalienable type, can bear no other than its own characteristic fruit. Nothing could be more adverse to the interest of the oak than to be tortured into bearing the apples of the apple tree; nothing could be more adverse to the interests of the apple tree than to be tortured into bearing acorns; nothing could be more opposed to the interests of both oak and apple tree, also of other trees, than to be pruned, shaped and twisted so as all to grow after a forced model, delineated on paper according to the rigid and limited imagination of a surveyor. The least possible constraint is, therefore, everybody's chief interest; if one particular restrictive agency is established, it is that every one may be preserved by if from other more powerful constraints, especially those which the foreigner and evil-doer would impose. Up to that point, and not further, its intervention is beneficial; beyond that point, it becomes one of the evils it is intended to forestall. Such then, if the common weal is to be looked after, the sole office of the State is,
1. to prevent constraint and, therefore, never to use it except to prevent worse constraints;
2. to secure respect for each individual in his own physical and moral domain; never to encroach on this except for that purpose and then to withdraw immediately;
3. to abstain from all indiscreet meddling, and yet more, as far as is practicable, without any sacrifice of public security;
4. to reduce old assessments, to exact only a minimum of subsidies and services;
5. to gradually limit even useful action;
6. to set itself as few tasks as possible;
7. to let each one have all the room possible and the maximum of initiative;
8. to slowly abandon monopolies;
9. to refrain from competition with private parties;
10. to rid itself of functions which these private parties can fulfill equally well—and we see that the limits assigned to the State by the public interest (l'intérêt commun) correspond to those stipulated by duty and justice.
VI. Indirect common interest.
Indirect common interest.—This consists in the most
economical and most productive employment of spontaneous
forces.—Difference between voluntary labor and forced
labor.—Sources of man's spontaneous action. Conditions of
their energy, work and products.—Motives for leaving them
under personal control.—Extent of the private domain.
—Individuals might voluntarily extend it.—What is left
becomes the domain of the State.—Obligatory functions of
the State.—Optional functions of the State.
Let us now take into consideration, no longer the direct, but the indirect interest of all. Instead of considering individuals let us concern ourselves with their works. Let us regard human society as a material and spiritual workshop, whose perfection consists in making it as productive, economical, and as well furnished and managed as possible. Even with this secondary and subordinate aim, the domain of the State is scarcely to be less restricted: very few new functions are to be attributed to it; nearly all the rest will be better fulfilled by independent persons, or by natural or voluntary associations.—
Let us consider the man who works for his own benefit, the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, and observe how attentive he is to his business. This is because his interest and pride are involved. One side his welfare and that of those around him is at stake, his capital, his reputation, his social position and advancement; on the other side, are poverty, ruin, social degradation, dependence, bankruptcy and the alms-house. In the presence of this alternative he keeps close watch and becomes industrious; he thinks of his business even when abed or at his meals; he studies it, not from a distance, speculatively, in a general way, but on the spot, practically, in detail, in all its bearings and relationships, constantly calculating difficulties and resources, with such sharp insight and special information that for any other person to try to solve the daily problem which he solves, would be impossible, because nobody could possess or estimate as he can the precise elements which constitute it.—Compare with this unique devotion and these peculiar qualifications the ordinary capacity and listless regularity of a senior public official, even when expert and honest. He is sure of his salary, provided he does his duty tolerably well, and this he does when he is occupied during official hours. Let his papers be correct, in conformity with regulations and custom, and nothing more is asked of him; he need not tax his brain beyond that. If he conceives any economical measure, or any improvement of his branch of the service, not he, but the public, an anonymous and vague impersonality, reaps all the benefit of it. Moreover, why should he care about it, since his project or reform might end up in the archives. The machine is too vast and complicated, too unwieldy, too clumsy, with its rusty wheels, its "old customs and acquired rights," to be renewed and rebuilt as one might a farm, a warehouse or a foundry. Accordingly, he has no idea of troubling himself further in the matter; on leaving his office he dismisses it from his mind; he lets things go on automatically, just as it happens, in a costly way and with indifferent results. Even in a country of as much probity as France, it is calculated that every enterprise managed by the State costs one quarter more, and brings in one quarter less, than when entrusted to private hands. Consequently if work were withheld from individuals in order that the State might undertake it the community, when the accounts came to be balanced, would suffer a loss of one-half.[2216]
Now, this is true of all work, whether spiritual or material not only of agricultural, industrial and commercial products, but, again, of works of science and of art, of literature and philosophy, of charity, of education and propaganda. Not only when driven by egoism, such as personal interest and vulgar vanity, but also when a disinterested sentiment is involved, such the discovery of truth, the creation of beauty, the propagation of a faith, the diffusion of convictions, religious enthusiasm or natural generosity, love in a broad or a narrow sense, spanning from one who embraces all humanity to one who devotes himself wholly to his friends and kindred. The effect is the same in both cases, because the cause is the same. Always, in the shop directed by the free workman, the motivating force is enormous, almost infinite, because it is a living spring which flows at all hours and is inexhaustible. The mother thinks constantly of her child, the savant of his science, the artist of his art, the inventor of his inventions, the philanthropist of his endowments, Faraday of electricity, Stephenson of his locomotive, Pasteur of his microbes, De Lesseps of his isthmus, sisters of charity of their poor. Through this peculiar concentration of thought, man derives every possible advantage from human faculties and surroundings; he himself gets to be a more and more perfect instrument, and, moreover, he fashions others: with this he daily reduces the friction of the powerful machine which he controls and of which he is the main wheel; he increases its yield ; he economizes, maintains, repairs and improves it with a capability and success that nobody questions; in short, he fabricates in a superior way.—But this living source, to which the superiority of the works is due, cannot be separated from the owner and chief, for it issues from his own affections and deepest sentiments. It is useless without him; out of his hands, in the hands of strangers, the fountain ceases to flow and production stops.—If, consequently, a good and large yield is required, he alone must have charge of the mill; he is the resident owner of it, the one who sets it in motion, the born engineer, installed and specially designed for that position. In vain may attempts be made to turn the stream elsewhere; there simply ensues a stoppage of the natural issue, a dam barring useful canals, a haphazard change of current not only without gain, but loss, the stream subsiding in swamps or undermining the steep banks of a ravine. At the utmost, the millions of buckets of water, forcibly taken from private reservoirs, half fill with a good deal of trouble the great central artificial basin in which the water, low and stagnant, is never sufficient in quantity or force to move the huge public wheel that replaces the small private wheels, doing the nation's work.
Thus, even when we only consider men as manufactures, even if we treat them simply as producers of what is valuable and serviceable, with no other object in view than to furnish society with supplies and to benefit the consumers, even though the private domain includes all enterprises undertaken by private individuals, either singly or associated together, through personal interests or personal taste, then this is enough to ensure that all is managed better than the State could have done; it is by virtue of this that they have devolved into their hands. Consequently, in the vast field of labor, they themselves decide on what they will undertake; they themselves, of their own authority, set their own limits. They may therefore enlarge their own domain to any extent they please, and reduce indefinitely the domain of the State. On the contrary, the State cannot pretend to more than what they leave; as they advance on their common territory separated by vague frontiers, it is bound to recede and leave the ground to them; whatever the task is, it should not perform it except in case of their default, or their prolonged absence, or on proof of their having abandoned it.
All the rest, therefore falls to the State; first, the offices which they would never claim, and which they will deliberately leave in its hands, because they do not have that indispensable instrument, called armed force. This force forces assures the protection of the community against foreign communities, the protection of individuals against one another, the levying of soldiers, the imposition of taxes, the execution of the laws, the administration of justice and of the police.—Next to this, come matters of which the accomplishment concerns everybody without directly interesting any one in particular—the government of unoccupied territory, the administration of rivers, coasts, forests and public highways, the task of governing subject countries, the framing of laws, the coinage of money, the conferring of a civil status, the negotiating in the name of the community with local and special corporations, departments, communes, banks, institutions, churches, and universities.—Add to these, according to circumstances, sundry optional co-operative services,[2217] such as subsidies granted to institutions of great public utility, for which private contributions could not suffice, now in the shape of concessions to corporations for which equivalent obligations are exacted, and, again, in those hygienic precautions which individuals fail to take through indifference; so occasionally, such provisional aid as supports a man, or so stimulates him as to enable him some day or other to support himself; and, in general, those discreet and scarcely perceptible interpositions for the time being which prove so advantageous in the future, like a far-reaching code and other consistent regulations which, mindful of the liberty of the existing individual, provide for the welfare of coming generations. Nothing beyond that.
Again, in this preparation for future welfare the same principle still holds.
VII. Fabrication of social instruments.
Fabrication of social instruments.—Application of this
principle.—How all kinds of useful laborers are formed.—
Respect for spontaneous sources, the essential and adequate
condition.—Obligation of the State to respect these.—They
dry up when it monopolizes them.—The aim of patriotism.—
The aim of other liberal dispositions.—Impoverishment of
all the productive faculties.—Destructive effect of the
Jacobin system.
Among the precious products, the most precious and important are, evidently, the animated instruments, namely the men, since they produce the rest. The object then, is to fashion men capable of physical, mental or moral labor, the most energetic, the most persistent, the most skillful and most productive; now, we already know the conditions of their formation. It is essential and sufficient, that the vivacious sources, described above, should flow there, on the spot, each through its natural outlet, and under the control of the owner. On this condition the jet becomes more vigorous, for the acquired impetus increases the original outflow; the producer becomes more and more skillful, since 'practice makes perfect.' Those around him likewise become better workmen, inasmuch as they find encouragement in his success and avail themselves of his discoveries.—Thus, simply because the State respects, and enforces respect, for these individual sources in private hands, it develops in individuals, as well as in those around them, the will and the talent for producing much and well, the faculty for, and desire to, keep on producing more and better; in other words, all sorts of energies and capacities, each of its own kind and in its own place, with all compatible fullness and efficiency. Such is the office, and the sole office, of the State, first in relation to the turbid and frigid springs issuing from selfishness and self-conceit, whose operations demand its oversight, and next for still stronger reasons, in relation to the warm and pure springs whose beneficence is unalloyed, as in the family affections and private friendships; again, in relation to those rarer and higher springs, such as the love of beauty, the yearning for truth, the spirit of association, patriotism and love of mankind; and, finally, for still stronger reasons, in relation to the two most sacred and salutary of all springs, conscience which renders will subject to duty, and honor which makes will the support of justice. Let the State prevent, as well as abstain from, any interference with either; let this be its object and nothing more; its abstention is as necessary as its vigilance. Let it guard both, and it will see everywhere growing spontaneously, hourly, each in degree according to conditions of time and place, the most diligent and most competent workmen, the agriculturist, the manufacturer, the merchant, the savant, the artist, the inventor, the propagandist, the husband and wife, the father and mother, the patriot, the philanthropist and the sister of charity.
On the contrary, if, like our Jacobins, the State seeks to confiscate every natural force to its own profit, it seeks to make affection for itself paramount, if it strives to suppress all other passions and interests, if it tolerates no other preoccupation than that which concerns the common weal, if it tries to forcibly convert every member of society into a Spartan or Jesuit, then, at enormous cost, will it not only destroy private fountains, and spread devastation over the entire territory, but it will destroy its own fountain-head. We honor the State only for the services it renders to us, and proportionately to these services and the security it affords us, and to the liberty which it ensures us under the title of universal benefactor; when it deliberately wounds us through our dearest interests and most tender affections, when it goes so far as to attack our honor and conscience, when it becomes the universal wrong-doer, our affection for it, in the course of time, turns into hatred. Let this system be maintained, and patriotism, exhausted, dries up, and, one by one, all other beneficent springs, until, finally, nothing is visible over the whole country, but stagnant pools or overwhelming torrents, inhabited by passive subjects or depredators. As in the Roman empire in the fourth century, in Italy in the seventeenth century, in the Turkish provinces in our own day, naught remains but an ill-conducted herd of stunted, torpid creatures, limited to their daily wants and animal instincts, indifferent to the public welfare and to their own prospective interests, so degenerate as to have lost sight of their own discoveries, unlearned their own sciences, arts and industries, and, in short, and worse than all, base, false, corrupted souls entirely wanting in honor and conscience. Nothing is more destructive than the unrestricted meddling of the State, even when wise and paternal; in Paraguay, under the discipline of Jesuits, so minute in its details, "Indian physiognomy appeared like that of animals taken in a trap." They worked, ate, drank and gave birth by sound of bells, under watch and ward, correctly and mechanically, but showing no liking for anything, not even for their own existence, being transformed into so may automatons; at least it may be said is that the means employed to produce this result were gentle and that they, before their transformation were mere brutes. But those who the revolutionary-Jesuit now undertakes to transform into robots, and by harsh means, are human beings.
VIII. Comparison between despotisms.
Comparison between despotisms.—Philip II and Louis XIV.—
Cromwell and Frederick the Great.—Peter the Great and the
Sultans.—Relationship between the tasks the Jacobins are to
carry out and the assets at their disposal.—Disproportion
between the burdens they are to carry and the forces at
their disposal.—Folly of their undertaking.—Physical force
the only governmental force they possess.—They are
compelled to exercise it.—They are compelled to abuse it.—
Character of their government.—Character requisite of their
leaders.
Several times, in European history, despotism almost equally harsh have born down heavily on human effort; but never have any of them been so thoroughly inept; for none have ever attempted to raise so heavy a mass with so short a lever. And to start with, no matter how authoritative the despot might have been, his intervention was limited.—Philip II. burned heretics, persecuted Moors and drove out Jews; Louis XIV. forcibly converted the Protestants; but both used violence only against dissenters, about a fifteenth or a twentieth of their subjects. If Cromwell, on becoming Protector, remained sectarian, and the compulsory servant of an army of sectarians, he took good care not to impose on other churches the theology, rites and discipline of his own church;[2218] on the contrary, he repressed fanatical outrages; protected the Anabaptists as well as his Independents. He granted paid curates to the Presbyterians as well as the public exercise of their worship, he showed the Episcopalians a large tolerance and gave them the right to worship in private; he maintained the two great Anglican universities and allowed the Jews to erect a synagogue.—Frederick II. drafted into his army every able-bodied peasant that he could feed; he kept every man twenty years in the service, under a discipline worse than slavery, with almost certain prospect of death; and in his last war, he sacrificed about one sixth of his male subjects;[2219] but they were serfs, and his conscription did not touch the bourgeois class. He put his hands in the pockets of the bourgeois and of every other man, and took every crown they had; when driven to it, he adulterated coin and stopped paying his functionaries; but, under the scrutiny of his eyes, always open, the administration was honest, the police effective, justice exact, toleration unlimited, and the freedom of the press complete; the king allowed the publication of the most cutting pamphlets against himself, and their public sale, even at Berlin.—A little earlier, in the great empire of the east, Peter the Great,[2220] with whip in hand, lashed his Muscovite bears and made them drill and dance in European fashion; but were bears accustomed from father to son to the whip and chain; moreover, he stood as the orthodox head of their faith, and left their mir (the village commune) untouched.—Finally, at the other extremity of Europe, and even outside of Europe, in the seventh century the caliph, in the fifteenth century a sultan, a Mahomet or an Omar, a fanatical Arab or brutal Turk, who had just overcome Christians with the sword, himself assigned the limits of his own absolutism: if the vanquished were reduced to the condition of heavily ransomed tributaries and of inferiors daily humiliated, he allowed them their worship, civil laws and domestic usages; he left them their institutions, their convents and their schools; he allowed them to administer the affairs of their own community as they pleased under the jurisdiction of their patriarch, or other natural chieftains.—Thus whatever the tyrant may have been, he did not attempt to entirely recast Man, nor to subject all his subjects to the recasting. However penetrating the tyranny, it stopped in the soul at a certain point; that point reached, the sentiments were left free. No matter how comprehensive this tyranny may have been, it affected only one class of men; the others, outside the net, remained free. When it wounded all at once all sensitive chords, it did so only to a limited minority, unable to defend themselves. As far as the majority, able to protect itself, their main sensibilities were respected, especially the most sensitive, this one or that one, as the case might be, now the conscience which binds man to his religion, now that amour-propre on which honor depends, and now the habits which make man cling to customs, hereditary usages and outward observances. As far as the others were concerned, those which relate to property, personal welfare, and social position, it proceeded cautiously and with moderation. In this way the discretion of the ruler lessened the resistance of the subject, and a daring enterprise, even mischievous, was not outrageous; it might be carried out; nothing was required but a force in hand equal to the resistance it provoked.
Again, and on the other hand, the tyrant possessed this force. Very many and very strong arms stood behind the prince ready to cooperate with him and countervail any resistance.—Behind Philip II. or Louis XIV. ready to drive the dissidents out or at least to consent to their oppression, stood the Catholic majority, as fanatical or as illiberal as their king. Behind Philip II., Louis XIV., Frederick II., and Peter the Great, stood the entire nation, equally violent, rallied around the sovereign through his consecrated title and uncontested right, through tradition and custom, through a rigid sentiment of duty and the vague idea of public security.—Peter the Great counted among his auxiliaries every eminent and cultivated man in the country; Cromwell had his disciplined and twenty-times victorious army; the caliph or sultan brought along with him his military and privileged population.—Aided by cohorts of this stamp, it was easy to raise a heavy mass, and even maintain it in a fixed position. Once the operation was concluded there followed a sort of equilibrium; the mass, kept in the air by a permanent counterbalance, only required a little daily effort to prevent it from falling.
It is just the opposite with the Jacobin enterprise. When it is put into operation, the theory, more exacting, adds an extra weight to the uplifted mass, and, finally, a burden of almost infinite weight.—At first, the Jacobin confined his attacks to royalty, to nobility, to the Church, to parliaments, to privileges, to ecclesiastical and feudal possessions, in short, to medieval foundations. Then he attacks yet more ancient and more solid foundations, positive religion, property and the family.—For four years he has been satisfied with demolition and now he wants to construct. His object is not merely to do away with a positive faith and suppress social inequality, to proscribe revealed dogmas, hereditary beliefs, an established cult, the supremacy of rank and superiority of fortunes, wealth, leisure, refinement and elegance, but he wants, in addition to all this, to re-fashion the citizen. He wants to create new sentiments, impose natural religion on the individual, civic education, uniform ways and habits, Jacobin conduct, Spartan virtue; in short, nothing is to be left in a human being that is not prescribed, enforced and constrained.—Henceforth, there is opposed to the Revolution, not alone the partisans of the ancient régime—priests, nobles, parliamentarians, royalists, and Catholics—but, again, every person imbued with European civilization, every member of a regular family, any possessor of a capital, large or small; every kind or degree of proprietor, farmer, manufacturer, merchant, artisan or farmer, even most of the revolutionaries. Nearly all the revolutionaries count on escaping the constraints they impose, and who only like the strait jacket when it is on another's back.—The influence of resistant wills at this moment becomes incalculable: it would be easier to raise a mountain, and, just at this moment, the Jacobins have deprived themselves of every moral force through which a political engineer acts on human wills.
Unlike Philip II. and Louis XIV. they are not supported by the intolerance of a vast majority, for, instead of fifteen or twenty orthodox against one heretic, they count in their church scarcely more than one orthodox against fifteen or twenty heretics.[2221]—They are not, like legitimate sovereigns, supported by the stubborn loyalty of an entire population, following in the steps of its chieftain out of the prestige of hereditary right and through habits of ancient fealty. On the contrary, their reign is only a day old and they themselves are interlopers. At first installed by a coup d'état and afterwards by the semblance of an election, they have extorted or obtained by trick the suffrages through which they act. They are so familiar with fraud and violence that, in their own Assembly, the ruling minority has seized and held on to power by violence and fraud, putting down the majority by riots, and the departments by force of arms. To give their brutalities the semblance of right, they improvise two pompous demonstrations, first, the sudden manufacture of a paper constitution, which molders away in their archives, and next, the scandalous farce of a hollow and compulsory plebiscite.—A dozen leaders of the party concentrate unlimited authority in their own hands; but, as admitted by them, their authority is derivative; it is the Convention which makes them its delegates; their precarious title has to be renewed monthly; a turn of the majority may sweep them and their work away to-morrow; an insurrection of the people, whom they have familiarized with insurrection, may to-morrow sweep them away, their work and their majority.—They maintain only a disputed, limited and transient ascendancy over their adherents. They are not military chieftains like Cromwell and Napoleon, generals of an army obeyed without a murmur, but common stump-speakers at the mercy of an audience that sits in judgment on them. There is no discipline in this public; every Jacobin remains independent by virtue of his principles; if he accepts leaders, it is with a reservation of their worth to him; selecting them as he pleases, he is free to change them when he pleases; his trust in them is intermittent, his loyalty provisional, and, as his adhesion depends on a mere preference, he always reserves the right to discard the favorite of to-day as he has discarded the favorite of yesterday. In this audience, there is no such thing as subordination; the lowest demagogue, any noisy subaltern, a Hébert or Jacques Roux, aspiring to step out of the ranks, overbidding the charlatans in office in order to obtain their places. Even with a complete and lasting ascendancy over an organized band of docile supporters, the Jacobin leaders would be feeble for lack of reliable and competent instruments; for they have but very few partisans other than those of doubtful probity and of notorious incapacity.—Cromwell had around him, to carry out the puritan program, the moral élite of the nation, an army of rigorists, with narrow consciences, but much more strict towards themselves than towards others, men who never drank and who never swore, who never indulged for a moment in sensuality or idleness, who forbade themselves every act of omission or commission about which they held any scruples, the most honest, the most temperate, the most laborious and the most persevering of mankind,[2222] the only ones capable of laying the foundations of that practical morality on which England and the United States still subsist at the present day.—Around Peter the Great, in carrying out his European program, stood the intellectual élite of the country, an imported staff of men of ability associated with natives of moderate ability, every well-taught resident foreigner and indigenous Russian, the only ones able to organize schools and public institutions, to set up a vast central and regular system of administration, to assign rank according to service and merit, in short, to erect on the snow and mud of a shapeless barbarism a conservatory of civilization which, transplanted like an exotic tree, grows and gradually becomes acclimated.—Around Couthon, Saint-Just, Billaud, Collot, and Robespierre, with the exception of certain men devoted, not to Utopianism but the country, and who, like Carnot, conform to the system in order to save France, there are but a few sectarians to carry out the Jacobin program. These are men so short-sighted as not to clearly comprehend its fallacies, or sufficiently fanatical to accept its horrors, a lot of social outcasts and self-constituted statesmen, infatuated through incommensurate faculties with the parts they play, unsound in mind and superficially educated, wholly incompetent, boundless in ambition, their consciences perverted, callous or deadened by sophistry, hardened through arrogance or killed by crime, by impunity and by success.
Thus, whilst other despots raise a moderate weight, calling around them either the majority or the flower of the nation, employing the best strength of the country and lengthening their lever (of despotism) as much as possible, the Jacobins attempt to raise an incalculable weight, repel the majority as well as the flower of the nation, discard the best strength of the country, and shorten their lever to the utmost. They hold on only to the shorter end, the rough, clumsy, iron-bound, creaking and grinding extremity, that is to say, to physical force,—the means for physical constraint, the heavy hand of the gendarme on the shoulder of the suspect, the jailer's bolts and keys turned on the prisoner, the club used by the sans-culottes on the back of the bourgeois to quicken his pace, and, better still, the Septembriseur's pike thrust into the aristocrat's belly, and the blade falling on the neck held fast in the clutches of the guillotine.—Such, henceforth, is the only machinery they posses for governing the country, for they have deprived themselves of all other. Their engine has to be exhibited, for it works only on condition that its bloody image be stamped indelibly on every body's imagination; if the Negro monarch or the pasha desires to see heads bowing as he passes along, he must be escorted by executioners. They must abuse their engine because fear losing its effect through habit, needs example to keep it alive; the Negro monarch or the pasha who would keep the fear alive by which he rules, must be stimulated every day; he must slaughter too many to be sure of slaughtering enough; he must slaughter constantly, in heaps, indiscriminately, haphazard, no matter for what offense, on the slightest suspicion, the innocent along with the guilty. He and his are lost the moment they cease to obey this rule. Every Jacobin, like every African monarch or pasha, must it that he may be and remain at the head of his band.—That is the reason why the chiefs of the party, its natural and pre-determined leaders, are theoreticians able to grasp its principle and logicians capable of drawing its consequences. They are, however, so inept as to be unable to understand that their enterprise exceeds both their own and all other human resources, but shrewd enough to see that brutal force is their only tool, inhuman enough to apply it unscrupulously and without reserve, and perverted enough to murder at random in order to disseminate terror.
2201 ([return])
[ Buchez et Roux, XXXII, 354. (Speech by Robespierre in the Convention, Floréal 18, year II.) "Sparta gleams like a flash of lightening amidst profoundest darkness".]
2202 ([return])
[ Milos taken by the Athenians; Thebes, after Alexander's victory; Corinth, after its capture by the Romans.—In the Peloponnesian war, the Plateans, who surrender at discretion, are put to death. Nicias is murdered in cold blood after his defeat in Sicily. The prisoners at oegos-Potamos have their thumbs cut off.]
2203 ([return])
[ Fustel de Coulanges, "La Cité Antique", ch. XVII.]
2204 ([return])
[ Plato, "The Apology of Socrates."—See also in the "Crito" Socrates' reasons for not eluding the penalty imposed on him. The antique conception of the State is here clearly set forth.]
2205 ([return])
[ Cf. the code of Manu, the Zendavesta, the Pentateuch and the Tcheou-Li. In this last code (Biot's translation), will be found the perfection of the system, particularly in vol. I., 241, 247, II., 393, III., 9, 11, 21, 52. "Every district chief, on the twelfth day of the first moon, assembles together the men of his district and reads to them the table of rules; he examines their virtue, their conduct, their progress in the right path, and in their knowledge, and encourages them; he investigates their errors, their failings and prevents them from doing evil.... Superintendents of marriages see that young people marry at the prescribed age." The reduction of man to a State automaton is plain enough in the institution of "Overseer of Gags..." At all grand hunts, at all gatherings of troops, he orders the application of gags. In these cases gags are put in the soldiers' mouths; they then fulfill their duties without tumult or shouting.">[
2206 ([return])
[ These two words have no exact equivalents in Greek or Latin, Conscientia, dignitas, honos denote different shade of meaning. This difference is most appreciable in the combination of the two modern terms delicate conscience, scrupulous conscience, and the phrase of stake one's honour on this or that, make it a point of honor, the laws of honor, etc. The technical terms of antique morality: the beautiful, truthfulness, the sovereign good, indicate ideas of another stamp and origin.]
2207 ([return])
[ Alas, modern 20th century democratic Man has given up honor and conscience, all he has got to do is to be correct and follow the thousands of rules governing his life. And, of course, make sure that he is following orders or sure of not being caught when he breaks the natural rules of friendship, honor or conscience. Conscience, on the other had, will always lurk somewhere in the shadows of our mind, because we all know how we would like to be treated by others, and will be forced not to transgress certain boundaries in case an intended victim might be in a position to take his revenge. That I am not alone in seeing things this way I noted in an interview with the 79 year old French author Michel Déon in Le Figaro on the 16th of May 1998 in which Mr. Déon said: "Everywhere we are still in a nursery. A great movement attempting to turn us all into half-wits (une grande campagne de crétinisation est en route). When these are the only ones left, the governments have an easy job. It is very clever." (SR.)]
2208 ([return])
[ Montaigne, Essays, book I., ch. 42: "Observe in provinces far from the court, in Brittany for example, the retinue, the subjects, the duties, the ceremony, of a seignior living alone by himself, brought up among his dependents, and likewise observe the flights of his imagination, there is nothing which is more royal; he may allude to his superior once a year, as if he were the King of Persia... The burden of sovereignty scarcely affects the French gentilhomme twice in his life... he who lurks in his own place avoiding dispute and trial is as free as the Duke of Venice.">[
2209 ([return])
[ "Mémoires de Chateaubriand," vol. I. ("Les Soirées au Chateau de Cambourg".)]
2210 ([return])
[ In China, the moral principle is just the opposite. The Chinese, amidst obstacles and embarrassments, always enjoin siao-sin, which means, "abate thy affections." (Huc, "L'Empire Chinoise," I., 204.)]
2211 ([return])
[ In the United states the moral order of things reposes chiefly on puritan ideas; nevertheless deep traces of feudal conceptions are found there; for instance, the general deference for women which is quite chivalric there, and even excessive.]
2212 ([return])
[ Observe, from this point of view, in the woman of modern times the defenses of female virtue. The (male) sentiment of duty is the first safeguard of modesty, but this has a much more powerful auxiliary in the sentiment of honor, or deep innate pride.]
2213 ([return])
[ The moral standard varies, but according to a fixed law, the same as a mathematical function. Each community has its own moral elements, organization, history and surroundings, and necessarily its peculiar conditions of vitality. When the queen been in a hive is chosen and impregnated this condition involves the massacre of useless male and female rivals (Darwin). In China, it consists of paternal authority, literary education and ritual observances. In the antique city, it consisted of the omnipotence of the State, gymnastic education, and slavery. In each century, and in each country, these vital conditions are expressed by more or less hereditary passwords which set forth or interdict this or that class of actions. When the individual feels the inward challenge he is conscious of obligation; the moral conflict consists in the struggle within himself between the universal password and personal desire. In our European society the vital condition, and thus the general countersign, is self-respect coupled with respect for others (including women and children). This countersign, new in history, has a singular advantage over all preceding ones: each individual being respected, each can develop himself according to his nature; he can accordingly invent in every sense, bring forth every sort of production and be useful to himself and others in every way, thus enabling society to develop indefinitely.]
2214 ([return])
[ Taine is probably speaking of the colonial wars in China and the conquest of Madagascar. (SR).]
2215 ([return])
[ Here Taine is seeing mankind as being male, strong and hardy; however I feel that liberty is more desirable for the strong and confident while the child, the lost, the sick, the ignorant or feeble person is looking for protection, reassurance and guidance. When society consisted of strong independent farmers, hunters, warriors, nomads or artisans backed by family and clan, liberty was an important idea. Today few if any can rise above the horde and gain the insights, the wisdom and the competence which once was such a common thing. Today the strong seek promotion inside the hierarchy of the welfare state rest-house. (S.R.)]
2216 ([return])
[ This is just what Lenin could not believe when he read this around 1906. Even Taine did not see how much a French government organization depended upon staff recruited from a hardworking, modest and honest French population. We have now lived to see how the nationalization of private property in Egypt, Argentina, Algeria not to speak of Ethiopia and India proved disastrous and how 40 years of government ownership should degrade and corrupt the populations of Russia, China, Yugoslavia, Albania etc. (SR).]
2217 ([return])
[ When the function to be performed is of an uncertain or mixed character the following rule may be applied in deciding whether the State or individuals shall be entrusted with it; also in determining, in the case of cooperation, what portion of it shall be assigned to individuals and what portion to the State. As a general rule, when individuals, either singly or associated together, have a direct interest in, or are drawn toward, a special function, and the community has no direct interest therein, the matter belongs to individuals and not to the State. On the other hand, if the interest of the community in any function is direct, and indirect for individuals singly or associated together, it is proper for the State and not for individuals to take hold of it.—According to this rule the limits of the public and private domain can be defined, which limits, as they change backward and forward, may be verified according to the changes which take place in interests and preferences, direct or indirect.]
2218 ([return])
[ Carlyle: "Cromwell's Speeches and Letters," III., 418. (Cromwell's address to the Parliament, September 17, 1656.)]
2219 ([return])
[ Seeley, "Life and Times of Stein," II., 143.—Macaulay, "Biographical essays," Frederick the Great. 33, 35, 87, 92.]
2220 ([return])
[ Eugene Schuyler, "Peter the Great," vol. 2.]
2221 ([return])
[ Cf. "The Revolution" vol. II., pp. 46 and 323, vol. III., ch I. Archives des Affaires Etrangèrés. Vol. 332. (Letter by Thiberge, Marseilles, Brumaire 14, year II.) "I have been to Marteygne, a small town ten leagues from Marseilles, along with my colleague Fournet; I found (je trouvée) seventeen patriots in a town of give thousand population."—Ibid., (Letter by Regulus Leclerc, Bergues, Brumaire 15, year II.) At Bergues, he says, "the municipality is composed of traders with empty stores and brewers without beer since the law of the maximum." Consequently there is universal lukewarmness, "only forty persons being found to form a popular club, holding sessions as a favor every five days.... Public spirit at Bergues is dead; fanaticism rules."—Archives Nationales, F7, 7164 (Department of Var, reports of year V. "General idea.")—"At Draguignan, out of seven thousand souls, forty patriots, exclusifs, despised or dishonest; at Vidauban, nine or ten exclusifs, favored by the municipality and who live freely without their means being known; at Brignolles, frequent robberies on the road by robbers said to have been very patriotic in the beginning of the Revolution: people are afraid of them and dare not name them; at Fréjus, nine leading exclusifs who pass all their time in the cafe."—Berryat-Saint-Prix, "La Justice Révolutionnaire," p. 146.—Brutus Thierry, grocer, member of the Rev. Com. Of Angers, said that "in angers, there were not sixty revolutionaries.">[
2222 ([return])
[ Macaulay. "History of England," I., 152. "The Royalists themselves confessed that, in every department of honest industry, the discarded warriors prospered beyond other men, that none was charged with any theft or robbery, that none was heard to ask an alms, and that, if a baker, a mason, or a waggoner attracted notice by his diligence and sobriety, he was in all probability one of Oliver's old soldiers.">[
BOOK THIRD. THE MEN IN POWER.
CHAPTER I. PSYCHOLOGY OF THE JACOBIN LEADERS.
I. Marat.
Marat.—Disparity between his faculties and pretensions.
—The Maniac.—The Ambitious delirium.—Rage for persecution.
—The permanent nightmare.—Homicidal frenzy.
Three men among the Jacobins, Marat, Danton and Robespierre, had deserved preeminence and held authority:—that is because they, due to a deformity or warping of their minds and their hearts, met the required conditions.—
Of the three, Marat is the most monstrous; he is nearly a madman, of which he displays the chief characteristics—furious exaltation, constant over-excitement, feverish restlessness, an inexhaustible propensity for scribbling, that mental automatism and single-mindedness of purpose constrained and ruled by a fixed idea. In addition to this, he displays the usual physical symptoms, such as insomnia, a pallid complexion, hot-headed, foulness of dress and person,[3101] with, during the last five months of his life, rashes and itching all over his body.[3102] Issuing from ill-matched stock, born of a mixed blood and tainted with serious moral agitation,[3103] he carries within him a peculiar germ: physically, he is a freak, morally a pretender, and one who covet all places of distinction. His father, who was a physician, intended, from his early childhood, that he should be a scholar; his mother, an idealist, had prepared him to become a philanthropist, while he himself always steered his course towards both summits.
"At five years of age," he says, "it would have pleased me to be a school-master, at fifteen a professor, at eighteen an author, and a creative genius at twenty,"[3104]and, afterwards, up to the last, an apostle and martyr to humanity. "From my earliest infancy I had an intense love of fame which changed its object at various stages of my life, but which never left me for a moment." He rambled over Europe or vegetated in Paris for thirty years, living a nomadic life in subordinate positions, hissed as an author, distrusted as a man of science and ignored as a philosopher, a third rate political writer, aspiring to every sort of celebrity and to every honor, constantly presenting himself as a candidate and as constantly rejected,—too great a disproportion between his faculties and ambition! Without talents,[3105] possessing no critical acumen and of mediocre intelligence, he was fitted only to teach some branch of the sciences, or to practice some one of the arts, either as professor or doctor more or less bold and lucky, or to follow, with occasional slips on one side or the other, some path clearly marked out for him. "But," he says, "I constantly refused any subject which did not hold out a promise.... of showing off my originality and providing great results, for I cannot make up my mind to treat a subject already well done by others."—Consequently, when he tries to originate he merely imitates, or commits mistakes. His treatise on "Man" is a jumble of physiological and moral common-places, made up of ill-digested reading and words strung together haphazard,[3106] of gratuitous and incoherent suppositions in which the doctrines of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, coupled together, end in empty phraseology. "Soul and Body are distinct substances with no essential relationship, being connected together solely through the nervous fluid;" this fluid is not gelatinous for the spirits by which it is renewed contains no gelatin; the soul, excited by this, excites that; hence the place assigned to it "in the brain."—His "Optics"[3107] is the reverse of the great truth already discovered by Newton more than a century before, and since confirmed by more than another century of experiment and calculation. On "Heat" and "Electricity" he merely puts forth feeble hypotheses and literary generalizations; one day, driven to the wall, he inserts a needle in a resin to make this a conductor, in which piece of scientific trickery he is caught by the physicist Charles.[3108] He is not even qualified to comprehend the great discoverers of his age, Laplace, Monge, Lavoisier, or Fourcroy; on the contrary, he libels them in the style of a low rebellious subordinate, who, without the shadow of a claim, aims to take the place of legitimate authorities. In Politics, he adopts every absurd idea in vogue growing out of the "Contrat-Social" based on natural right, and which he renders still more absurd by repeating as his own the arguments advanced by those bungling socialists, who, physiologists astray in the moral world, derive all rights from physical necessities.
"All human rights issue from physical wants[3109]... If a man has nothing, he has a right to any surplus with which another gorges himself. What do I say? He has a right to seize the indispensable, and, rather than die of hunger, he may cut another's throat and eat his throbbing flesh.... Man has a right to self-preservation, to the property, the liberty and even the lives of his fellow creatures. To escape oppression he has a right to repress, to bind and to massacre. He is free to do what he pleases to ensure his own happiness."
It is plain enough what this leads to.—But, let the consequences be what they may, whatever he writes or does, it is always in self-admiration and always in a counter sense, being as vain-glorious of his encyclopedic impotence as he is of his social mischievousness. Taking his word for it, his discoveries in Physics will render him immortal[3110]:
"They will at least effect a complete transformation in Optics.... The true primitive colors were unknown before me."
He is a Newton, and still better. Previous to his appearance "the place occupied by the electrical fluid in nature, considered as an universal agent, was completely ignored. .. I have made it known in such a way as to leave no further doubt about it."[3111] As to the heat-engendering fluid, "that substance unknown until my discovery, I have freed the theory from every hypothesis and conjecture, from every alembic argument; I have purged it of error, I have rendered it intuitive; I have written this out in a small volume which consigns to oblivion all that scientific bodies have hitherto published on that subject."[3112] Anterior to his treatise on "Man," the relationships between moral and physics were incomprehensible. "Descartes, Helvetius, Hailer, Lecat, Hume, Voltaire, Bonnet, held this to be an impenetrable secret, 'an enigma.'" He has solved the problem, he has fixed the seat of the soul, he has determined the medium through which the soul communicates with the body.[3113]—In the higher sciences, those treating of nature generally, or of human society, he reaches the climax. "I believe that I have exhausted every combination of the human intellect in relation to morals, philosophy and political science."[3114] Not only has he discovered the true theory of government, but he is a statesman, a practical expert, able to forecast the future and shape events. He makes predictions, on the average, twice a week, which always turn out right; he already claims, during the early sessions of the Convention, to have made "three hundred predictions on the leading points of the Revolution, all justified by the event."[3115]—In the face of the Constituents who demolish and reconstruct so slowly, he is sufficiently strong to take down, put up and complete at a moment's notice.
"If I were one of the people's tribunes[3116] and were supported by a few thousand determined men, I answer for it that, in six weeks, the Constitution would be perfected, the political machine well agoing, and the nation free and happy. In less than a year there would be a flourishing, formidable government which would remain so as long as I lived."—If necessary, he could act as commander-in-chief of the army and always be victorious: having twice seen the Vendeans carry on a fight he would end the war "at the first encounter."[3117]—"If I could stand the march, I would go in person and carry out my views. At the head of a small party of trusty troops the rebels could be easily put down to the last man, and in one day. I know something of military art, and; without boasting, I can answer for success."—On any difficulty occurring, it is owing to his advice not having been taken; he is the great political physician: his diagnosis from the beginning of the Revolution is always correct, his prognosis infallible, his therapeutics efficacious, humane and salutary. He provides the panacea and he should be allowed to prescribe it; only, to ensure a satisfactory operation, he should himself administer the dose. Let the public lancet, therefore, be put in his hands that he may perform the humanitarian operation of bloodletting. "Such are my opinions. I have published them in my works. I have signed them with my name and I am not ashamed of it.... If you are not equal to me and able to comprehend me so much the worse for you."[3118] In other words, in his own eyes, Marat is in advance of everybody else and, through his superior genius and character, he is the veritable savior.
Such are the symptoms by which medical men recognize immediately one of those partial lunatics who may not be put in confinement, but who are all the more dangerous;[3119] the malady, as they would express it in technical terms, may be called the ambitious delirium, well known in lunatic asylums.—Two predispositions, one an habitually perverted judgment, and the other a colossal excess of self-esteem,[3120] constitute its sources, and nowhere are both more prolific than in Marat. Never did a man with such diversified culture, possess such an incurably perverted intellect. Never did a man, after so many abortive speculations and such repeated malpractices, conceive and maintain so high an opinion of himself. Each of these two sources in him augments the other: through his faculty of not seeing things as they are, he attributes to himself virtue and genius; satisfied that he possesses genius and virtue, he regards his misdeeds as merits and his whims as truths.—Thenceforth, and spontaneously, his malady runs its own course and becomes complex; to the ambitious delirium comes the persecution mania. In effect, the evident or demonstrated truths which he advances should strike the public at once; if they burn slowly or miss fire, it is owing to their being stamped out by enemies or the envious; manifestly, they have conspired against him, and against him plots have never ceased. First came the philosophers' plot: when his treatise on "Man" was sent to Paris from Amsterdam, "they felt the blow I struck at their principles and had the book stopped at the custom-house."[3121] Next came the plot of the doctors: "they ruefully estimated my enormous gains. Were it necessary, I could prove that they often met together to consider the best way to destroy my reputation." Finally, came the plot of the Academicians; "the disgraceful persecution I had to undergo from the Academy of Sciences for two years, after being satisfied that my discoveries on Light upset all that it had done for a century, and that I was quite indifferent about becoming a member of its body.... Would it be believed that these scientific charlatans succeeded in underrating my discoveries throughout Europe, in exciting every society of savants against me, and in closing against me all the newspapers?"[3122]—Naturally, the would-be-persecuted man defends himself, that is to say, he attacks. Naturally, as he is the aggressor, he is repulsed and put down, and, after creating imaginary enemies, he creates real ones, especially in politics where, on principle, he daily preaches insurrection and murder. And finally, he is of course prosecuted, convicted at the Chatelet court, tracked by the police, obliged to fly and wander from one hiding-place to another; to live like a bat "in a cellar, underground, in a dark dungeon;"[3123] once, says his friend Panis, he passed "six weeks sitting on his behind" like a madman in his cell, face to face with his reveries.—It is not surprising that, with such a system, the reverie should become more intense, more and more gloomy, and, at last settle down into a confirmed nightmare; that, in his distorted brain, objects should appear distorted; that, even in full daylight men and things should seem awry, as in a magnifying, dislocating mirror; that, frequently, on the numbers (of his journal) appearing too blood-thirsty, and his chronic disease too acute, his physician should bleed him to arrest these attacks and prevent their return.[3124]
But it has become a habit: henceforth, falsehood grow in his brain as if it was their native soil; planting himself on the irrational he cultivates the absurd, even physical and mathematical. "If we include everyone;"[3125] he says, "the patriotic tax-contribution of one-quarter of all income will produce, at the very least, 4,860 millions, and perhaps twice that sum." With this sum M. Necker may raise five hundred thousand men, which he calculates on for the subjugation of France.—Since the taking of the Bastille, "the municipality's waste alone amount to two hundred millions. The sums pocketed by Bailly are estimated at more than two millions; what 'Mottié' (Lafayette) has taken for the past two years is incalculable."[3126]—On the 15th of November, 1791, the gathering of emigrés comprises "at least 120,000 former gentlemen and drilled partisans and soldiers, not counting the forces of the German princes about to join them."[3127]—Consequently, as with his brethren in Bicêtre, (a lunatic asylum), he raves incessantly on the horrible and the foul: the procession of terrible or disgusting phantoms has begun.[3128] According to him, the scholars who do not choose to admire him are fools, charlatans and plagiarists. Laplace and Monge are even "automatons," so many calculating machines; Lavoisier, "reputed father of every discovery causing a sensation in the world, has not an idea of his own;" he steals from others without comprehending them, and "changes his system as he changes his shoes." Fourcroy, his disciple and horn-blower, is of still thinner stuff. All are scamps: "I could cite a hundred instances of dishonesty by the Academicians of Paris, a hundred breaches of trust;" twelve thousand francs were entrusted to them for the purpose of ascertaining how to direct balloons, and "they divided it among themselves, squandering it at the Rapée, the opera and in brothels."[3129]—In the political world, where debates are battles, it is still worse. Marat's publication "The Friend of the people" has merely rascals for adversaries. Praise of Lafayette's courage and disinterestedness, how absurd If he went to America it was because he was jilted, "cast off by a Messalina;" he maintained a park of artillery there as "powder-monkeys look after ammunition-wagons; "these are his only exploits; besides, he is a thief. Bailly is also a thief, and Mabuet a "clown." Necker has conceived the "horrible project of starving and poisoning the people; he has drawn on himself for all eternity the execration of Frenchmen and the detestation of mankind."—What is the Constituent Assembly but a set of "low, rampant, mean, stupid fellows?"—"Infamous legislators, vile scoundrels, monsters athirst for gold and blood, you traffic with the monarch, with our fortunes, with our rights, with our liberties, with our lives!"—"The second legislative corps is no less rotten than the first one."—In the Convention, Roland, "the officious Gilles and the forger Pasquin, is the infamous head of the monopolizers." "Isnard is a juggler, Buzot a Tartuffe, Vergniaud a police spy."[3130]—When a madman sees everywhere around him, on the floor, on the walls, on the ceiling, toads, scorpions, spiders, swarms of crawling, loathsome vermin, he thinks only of crushing them, and the disease enters on its last stage: after the ambitious delirium, the mania for persecution and the settled nightmare, comes the homicidal mania.
With Marat, this broke out at the very beginning of the Revolution. The disease was innate; he was inoculated with it beforehand. He had contracted it in good earnest, on principle; never was there a plainer case of deliberate insanity.—On the one hand, having derived the rights of man from physical necessities, he concluded, "that society owes to those among its members who have no property, and whose labor scarcely suffices for their support, an assured subsistence, the wherewithal to feed, lodge and clothe oneself suitably, provision for attendance in sickness and when old age comes on, and for bringing up children. Those who wallow in wealth must (then) supply the wants of those who lack the necessaries of life." Otherwise, "the honest citizen whom society abandons to poverty and despair, reverts back to the state of nature and the right of forcibly claiming advantages which were only alienated by him to procure greater ones. All authority which is opposed to this is tyrannical, and the judge who condemns a man to death (through it) is simply a cowardly assassin."[3131]
Thus do the innumerable riots which the dearth excites, find justification, and, as the dearth is permanent, the daily riot is legitimate.—On the other hand, having laid down the principle of popular sovereignty he deduces from this, "the sacred right of constituents to dismiss their delegates;" to seize them by the throat if they prevaricate, to keep them in the right path by fear, and wring their necks should they attempt to vote wrong or govern badly. Now, they are always subject to this temptation.
"If there is one eternal truth of which it is important to convince man, it is that the mortal enemy of the people, the most to be dreaded by them, is the Government."—"Any minister who remains more than 2 days in office, once the ministry is able to plot against the country is 'suspect.' "[3132]—Bestir yourselves, then, ye unfortunates in town and country, workmen without work, street stragglers without fuel or shelter sleeping under bridges, prowlers along the highways, beggars, tattered vagabonds, cripples and tramps, and seize your faithless representatives!—On July 14th and October 5th and 6th, "the people had the right not only to execute some of the conspirators in military fashion, but to immolate them all, to put to the sword the entire body of royal satellites leagued together for our destruction, the whole herd of traitors to the country, of every condition and degree."[3133] Never go to the Assembly, "without filling your pockets with stones and throwing them at the impudent scoundrels who preach monarchical maxims;" "I recommend to you no other precaution but that of telling their neighbors to look out."[3134]—"We do not demand the resignation of the ministers-we demand their heads. We demand the heads of all the cabinet officials in the Assembly, your mayor's, your general's, the heads of most of the staff-officers, of most of the municipal council, of the principal agents of the executive power in the kingdom. "—Of what use are half-way measures, like the sack of the hotel de Castries?[3135]
"Avenge yourselves wisely! Death! Death! is the sole penalty for traitors raging to destroy you It is the only one that strikes terror into them. Follow the example of your implacable enemies! Keep always armed, so that they may not escape through the delays of the law! Stab them on the spot or blow their brains out!"—"Twenty-four millions of men shout in unison: If the black, gangrened, archi-gangrened officials dare pass a bill reducing and reorganizing the army, citizens, then you build eight hundred scaffolds in the Tuileries garden and hang on them every traitor to his country—that infamous Riquetti, Comte de Mirabeau, at the head of them—and, at the same time, erect in the middle of the fountain basin a big pile of logs to roast the ministers and their tools!"[3136]—Could "the Friend of the People" rally around him two thousand men determined "to save the country, he would go and tear the heart out of that infernal Mottié in the very midst of his battalions of slaves; he would go and burn the monarch and his imps in his palace, impale the deputies on their benches, and bury them beneath the flaming ruins of their den."[3137]-On the first cannon shot being fired on the frontier,
"it is indispensable that the people should close the gates of the towns and unhesitatingly make way with every priest, public functionary and anti-revolutionary, known instigators and their accomplices."—"It would be wise for the people's magistrates to keep constantly manufacturing large quantities of strong, sharp, short-bladed, double-edged knives, so as to arm each citizen known as a friend of his country. Now, the art of fighting with these terrible weapons consists in this: Use the left arm as buckler, and cover it up to the arm-pit with a sleeve quilted with some woollen stuff, filled with rags and hair, and then rush on the enemy, the right hand wielding the knife."[3138]—Let us use these knives as soon as possible, for "what means are now remaining for us to put an end to the problems which overwhelm us? I repeat it, no other but executions by the people."[3139]—The Throne is at last down; but "be careful not to give way to false pity!.... No quarter! I advise you to decimate the anti-revolutionary members of the municipality, of the justices of the peace, of the members of the departments and of the National Assembly."[3140]—At the outset, a few lives would have sufficed: "five hundred heads ought to have fallen when the Bastille was taken, and all would then have gone on well." But, through lack of foresight and timidity, the evil was allowed to spread, and the more it spread the larger the amputation should have been.—With the sure, keen eye of the surgeon, Marat gives its dimensions; he has made his calculation beforehand. In September, 1792, in the Council at the Commune, he estimates forty thousand as the number of heads that should be laid low.[3141] Six weeks later, the social abscess having enormously increased, the figures swell in proportion; he now demands two hundred and seventy thousand heads,[3142] always on the score of humanity, "to ensure public tranquility," on condition that the operation be entrusted to him, as the temporary enforcer of the justice.—Except for this last point, the rest is granted to him; it is unfortunate that he could not see with his own eyes the complete fulfillment of his programme, the batches condemned by the revolutionary Tribunal, the massacres of Lyons and Toulon, the drownings of Nantes.—From the beginning to the end, he was in keeping with the Revolution, lucid on account of his blindness, thanks to his crazy logic, thanks to the concordance of his personal malady with the public malady, to the early manifestation of his complete madness in the midst of the incomplete or tardy madness of the rest, he alone steadfast, remorseless, triumphant, perched aloft at the first bound on the sharp pinnacle which his rivals dared not climb or only stumbled up.
II. Danton.
Danton.—Richness of his faculties.—Disparity between his
condition and instincts.—The Barbarian.—His work.—His
weakness.
There is nothing of the madman about Danton; on the contrary, not only is his intellect sound, but he possesses political aptitudes to an eminent degree, and to such an extent that, in this particular, none of his associates or adversaries compare with him, while, among the men of the Revolution, only Mirabeau equals or surpasses him. He is an original, spontaneous genius and not, like most of his contemporaries, a disputatious, quill-driving theorist,[3143] that is to say, a fanatical pedant, an artificial being composed of his books, a mill-horse with blinkers, and turning around in a circle without an issue. His free judgment is not hampered by abstract prejudices: he does not carry about with him a social contract, like Rousseau, nor, like Siéyès, a social art and cabinet principles or combinations;[3144] he has kept aloof from these instinctively and, perhaps, through contempt for them; he had no need of them; he would not have known what to do with them. Systems are crutches for the impotent, while he is able-bodied; formulas serve as spectacles for the short-sighted, while his eyes are good. "He had read and meditated very little," says a learned and philosophical witness;[3145] "his knowledge was scanty and he took no pride in investigation; but he observed and saw .. His native capacity, which was very great and not absorbed by other things, was naturally closed to vague, complex and false notions, and naturally open to every notion of experience the truth of which was made manifest." Consequently, "his perceptions of men and things, sudden, clear, impartial and true, were instinct with solid, practical discretion." To form a clear idea of the divergent or concordant dispositions, fickle or earnest, actual or possible, of different parties and of twenty-six millions of souls, to justly estimate probable resistances, and calculate available forces, to recognize and take advantage of the one decisive moment, to combine executive means, to find men of action, to measure the effect produced, to foresee near and remote contingencies, to regret nothing and take things coolly, to accept crimes in proportion to their political efficacy, to dodge before insurmountable obstacles, even in contempt of current maxims, to consider objects and men the same as an engineer contracting for machinery and calculating horse-power[3146]—such are the faculties of which he gave proof on the 10th of August and the 2nd of September, during his effective dictatorship between the 10th of August and the 21st of September, afterwards in the Convention, on the first Committee of Public Safety, on the 31st of May and on the 2nd of June:[3147] we have seen him busy at work. Up to the last, in spite of his partisans, he has tried to diminish or, at least, not add to, the resistance the government had to overcome. Nearly up to the last, in spite of his adversaries, he tried to increase or, at least, not destroy the available forces of the government. In defiance of the outcries of the clubs, which clamor for the extermination of the Prussians, the capture of the King of Prussia, the overthrow of all thrones, and the murder of Louis XVI., he negotiated the almost pacific withdrawal of Brunswick;[3148] he strove to detach Prussia from the coalition;[3149] he wanted to turn a war of propaganda into one of interests;[3150] he caused the Convention to pass the decree that France would not in any way interfere with foreign governments; he secured an alliance with Sweden; he prescribed beforehand the basis of the treaty of Basle, and had an idea of saving the King.[3151] In spite of the distrust and attacks of the Girondists, who strove to discredit him and put him out of the way, he persists in offering them his hand; he declared war on them only because they refused to make peace,[3152] and he made efforts to save them when they were down. Amidst so many ranters and scribblers whose logic is mere words and whose rage is blind, who grind out phrases like a hand-organ, or are wound up for murder, his intellect, always capacious and supple, went right to facts, not to disfigure and pervert them, but to accept them, to adapt himself to them, and to comprehend them. With a mind of this quality one goes far no matter in what direction; nothing remains but to choose one's path. Mandrin, under the ancient régime, was also, in a similar way, a superior man;[3153] only he chose the highway.
Between the demagogue and the highwayman the resemblance is close: both are leaders of bands and each requires an opportunity to organize his band. Danton, to organize his band, needed the Revolution.—"Of low birth, without patronage," penniless, every office being filled, and "the Paris bar exorbitantly priced," admitted a lawyer after "a struggle," he for a long time wandered jobless frequenting the coffee-houses, the same as similar men nowadays frequent the bars. At the Café de l'École, the proprietor, a good natured old fellow "in a small round wig, gray coat and a napkin on his arm," circulated among his tables smiling blandly, while his daughter sat in the rear as cashier.[3154] Danton chatted with her and demanded her hand in marriage. To obtain her, he had to mend his ways, purchase an attorneyship in the Court of the Royal Council and find guarantors and sponsors in his small native town.[3155] Once married and lodged in the gloomy Passage du Commerce, he finds himself "more burdened with debts than with causes," tied down to a sedentary profession which demands vigorous application, accuracy, a moderate tone, a respectable style and blameless deportment; obliged to keep house on so small a scale that, without the help of a louis regularly advanced to him each week by his coffee-house father-in-law, he could not make both ends meet.[3156] His free-and-easy tastes, his alternately impetuous and indolent disposition, his love of enjoyment and of having his own way, his rude, violent instincts, his expansiveness, creativeness and activity, all rebel against this life: he is ill-suited for the quiet routine of our civil careers. It is not the steady discipline of an old society, but the tumultuous brutality of a society going to pieces or in a state of formation, that suits him. In temperament and character he is a barbarian, and a barbarian born to command his fellow-creatures, like this or that vassal of the sixth century or baron of the tenth century. A giant with the face of a "Tartar," pitted with the small-pox, tragically and terribly ugly, with a mask convulsed like that of a growling "bull-dog,"[3157] 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 appears boundless like a force of nature, when speaking he is roaring like a bull and be 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 personalities.[3158] He may be profane, using emphatic terms,[3159] cynical, but not monotonous and affected like Hébert, but spontaneous 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. He is, both outwardly and inwardly, the best fitted for winning the confidence and sympathy of a Gallic, Parisian populace. His talents all contribute to "his inborn, practical popularity," and to make of him "a grand-seignior of sans-cullotterie."[3160]—With such talents for acting, there is a strong temptation to act it out the moment the theatre is ready, whatever the theatre, even unlawful and murky, whatever the actors rogues, scoundrels and loose women, whatever the part, ignoble, murderous, and finally fatal to him who undertakes it.—To hold out against such temptation, would require a sentiment of repugnance which a refined or thorough culture develops in both sense and mind, but which was completely wanting in Danton. Nothing disgusts him physically or morally: he embraces Marat,[3161] fraternizes with drunkards, congratulates the Septembriseurs, retorts in blackguard terms to the insults of prostitutes, treats reprobates, thieves and jail-birds as equals,—Carra, Westermann, Huguenin, Rossignol and the confirmed scoundrels whom he sends into the departments after the 2nd of September.
"Eh! What the hell! Do you think we ought to send young misses." [3162] Garbage men are needed for the collection of garbage; one cannot hold one's nose when they come for their wages; one must pay them well, talk to them encouragingly, and leave them plenty of elbow room. Danton is willing to play the part of the fire, and he humors vices; he has no scruples, and lets people scratch and take.—He has stolen as much to give as to keep, to maintain his role as much as to benefit by it, squaring accounts by spending the money of the Court against the Court, probably inwardly chuckling, the same as the peasant in a blouse on getting ahead of his well-duped landlord, or as the Frank, whom the ancient historian describes as leering on pocketing Roman gold the better to make war against Rome.—The graft on this plebeian seedling has not taken; in our modern garden this remains as in the ancient forest; its vigorous sap preserves its primitive raciness and produces none of the fine fruits of our civilization, a moral sense, honor and conscience. Danton has no respect for himself nor for others; the nice, delicate limitations that circumscribe human personality, seem to him as legal conventionality and mere drawing-room courtesy. Like a Clovis, he tramples on this, and like a Clovis, equal in faculties, in similar expedients, and with a worse horde at his back, he throws himself athwart society, to stagger along, destroy and reconstruct it to his own advantage.
At the start, he comprehended the peculiar character and normal procedure of the Revolution, that is to say, the useful agency of popular brutality: in 1788 he had already figured in insurrections. 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[3163] 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 afterwards reign, the permanent president of the district, commander of the battalion, orator of the club, and the concocter of bold undertakings. Here, usurpation is the rule there is no recognition of legal authority; they brave the King, the ministers, the judges, the Assembly, the municipality, the mayor, the commandant of the National Guard. Nature and principle raise them above the law; the district takes Marat under its protection, posts two sentinels at his door to protect him from prosecutions, and uses arms against the armed force sent with a warrant to arrest him.[3164] yet more, in the name of the city of Paris, "chief sentinel of the nation," they assume to govern France: Danton betakes himself to the National Assembly and declares that the citizens of Paris are the natural representatives of the eighty-three departments, and summons it, on their injunction, to cancel an act it has passed.[3165]—The entire Jacobin conception is therein expressed: Danton, with his keen insight, took it all in and proclaimed it in appropriate terms; to apply it at the present time on a grand scale,[3166] he has merely to pass from the small theatre to the large one, from the Cordeliers club to the Commune, to the Ministry, and the Committee of Public Safety, and, in all these theatres, he plays the same part with the same end in view and the same results. A despotism formed by conquest and maintained by terror, the despotism of the Jacobin Parisian rabble, is the end to which he directly marches. He employs no other means and, adapting the means to the end and the end to the means, manages the important days and instigates the decisive measures of the Revolution: the 10th of August,[3167] the 2nd of September, the 31st of May, the 2nd of June;[3168] the decree providing for an army of paid sans-culottes "to keep down aristocrats with their pikes;" the decree in each commune where grain is dear, taxing the rich to put bread within reach of the poor;[3169] the decree giving laborers forty sous for attending the meetings of the Section Assemblies;[3170] the institution of the revolutionary Tribunal;[3171] the proposal to erect the Committee of Public Safety into a provisional government; the proclamation of Terror; the concentration of Jacobin zeal on useful works; the employment of the eight thousand delegates of the primary assemblies, who had been sent home as recruiting agents for the universal armament;[3172] the inflammatory expressions of young men on the frontier; the wise resolutions for limiting the levy en masse to men between eighteen and twenty-five, which put an end to the scandalous songs and dances by the populace in the very hall of the Convention.[3173]
In order to set the machine up, he cleared the ground, fused the metal, hammered out the principal pieces, filed off the blisters, designed the action, adjusted the minor wheels, set it agoing and indicated what it had to do, and, at the same time, he forged the armor which guarded it against strangers and outside 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 give a helping hand, win the support of an assembly or a mob, direct, high-handedly and for a few weeks, an executive committee. But regular, persistent labor is repugnant to him; he is not made for bookkeeping,[3174] for paper and administrative work. 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,[3175] 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,"[3176] he had shielded or saved many eminent men from the butchers. When the axe 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 fore-thought. 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."[3177]—"Let Robespierre and Saint-Just alone, and there will soon be nothing left in France but a Thebiad of political Trappists."[3178]—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."[3179]
But he has aspired to govern them; he constructed a new machine for the purpose, and, deaf to its squeals, it worked in conformity with the 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. This Danton cannot, will not be.—He gets out of the way, diverts himself, gambles,[3180] forgets; he supposes that the titular decapitators will probably consent to take no notice of him; in any event 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.
III. Robespierre.
Robespierre.—Mediocrity of his faculties.—The Pedant.
—Absence of ideas.—Study of phrases.—Wounded self-esteem.
—His infatuation.—He plays victim.—His gloomy fancies.—His
resemblance to Marat.—Difference between him and Marat.
—The sincere hypocrite.—The festival in honor of the Supreme
Being, and the law of Prairial 22.—The external and
internal characters of Robespierre and the Revolution.
Even with the firm determination to remain decapitator-in-chief, Danton could never be a perfect representative of the Revolution. It is an armed but philosophical robbery; its creed includes robbery and assassination, but only as a knife in its sheath; the showy, polished sheath is for public display, and not the sharp and bloody blade. Danton, like Marat, lets the blade be too plainly visible. At the mere sight of Marat, filthy and slovenly, with his livid, frog-like face, with his round, gleaming and fixed eyeballs, and his bold, maniacal stare and steady monotonous rage, common-sense rebels; no-one selects a homicidal maniac as a guide. At the mere sight of Danton, with his porter's vocabulary, his voice like an alarm bell of insurrection, his cyclopean features and air of an exterminator, humanity takes alarm; one does not surrender oneself to a political butcher without repugnance. The Revolution demands another interpreter, like itself captivatingly fitted out, and Robespierre fits the bill,[3181] with his irreproachable attire, well-powdered hair, carefully brushed coat,[3182] strict habits, dogmatic tone, and formal, studied manner of speaking. No mind, in its mediocrity and incompetence, so well harmonizes with the spirit of the epoch. The reverse of the statesman, he soars in empty space, amongst abstractions, always mounted on a principle and incapable of dismounting so as to see things practically.
"That bastard there," exclaims Danton, "is not even able to boil an egg!"
"The vague generalities of his preaching," writes another contemporary,[3183] "rarely culminated in any specific measure or legal provision. He combated everything and proposed nothing; the secret of his policy happily accorded with his intellectual impotence and with the nullity of his legislative conceptions." Once he has rattled his revolutionary pedantry off, he no longer knows what to say.—As to financial matters and military art, he knows nothing and risks nothing, except to underrate or calumniate Carnot and Cambon who did know and who took risks.[3184]—In relation to a foreign policy his speech on the state of Europe is the amplification of a schoolboy; on exposing the plans of the English minister he reaches the pinnacle of chimerical nonsense;[3185] eliminate the rhetorical passages, and it is not the head of a government who speaks, but the porter of the Jacobin club. On contemporary France, as it actually exists, he has not one sound or specific idea: instead of men, he sees only twenty-six millions simple robots, who, when duly led and organized, will work together in peace and harmony. Basically they are good,[3186] and will, after a little necessary purification, become good again. Accordingly, their collective will is "the voice of reason and public interest," hence, on meeting together, they are wise. "The people's assembly of delegates should deliberate, if possible, in the presence of the whole body of the people;" the Legislative body, at least, should hold its sittings "in a vast, majestic edifice open to twenty thousand spectators." Note that for the past four years, in the Constituent Assembly, in the Legislative Assembly, in the Convention, at the Hotel de-Ville, in the Jacobin Club, wherever Robespierre speaks, the galleries have never ceased to shout, yell and express their opinion. Such a positive, palpable experience would open anybody's eyes; his are closed through prejudice or interest; even physical truth finds no access to his mind, because he is unable to comprehend it, or because he has to keep it out. He must, accordingly, be either obtuse or a charlatan. Actually he is both, for both combine to form the pedant (cuistre), that is to say, the hollow, inflated mind which, filled with words and imagining that these are ideas, revels in its own declamation and dupes itself that it may dictate to others.
Such is his title, his personality and role. In this artificial and declamatory tragedy of the Revolution he takes the leading part; the maniac and the barbarian slowly retire in the background on the appearance of the cuistre; Marat and Danton finally become effaced, or efface themselves, and the stage is left to Robespierre who attracts all the attention.[3187]—If we want to understand him we must look at him as he stands in the midst of his surroundings. At the last stage of a dying intellectual vegetation, on the last branch of the eighteenth century, he is the final freak and dried fruit of the classical spirit.[3188] He has retained nothing of a worn-out system of philosophy but its lifeless dregs and well-conned formulae, the formulae of Rousseau, Mably, and Raynal, concerning "the people, nature, reason, liberty, tyrants, factions, virtue, morality," a ready-made vocabulary,[3189] 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;[3190] 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 spout and spread out so complacently and lengthily as he. 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.[3191] When we, in astonishment, ask ourselves 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 sectarian 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 container 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.—Through this extreme perversity, the cuistre spoils his own mental instrument; thenceforth he employs it as he likes, as his passions dictate, believing that he serves truth in serving these.
Now, his first passion, his principal passion, is literary vanity. Never was the chief of a party, sect or government, even at critical moments, such an incurable, insignificant rhetorician, so formal, so pompous, and so dull.—On the eve of the 9th of Thermidor, when it was a question of life or death, he enters the tribune with a set speech, written and re-written, polished and re-polished,[3192] overloaded with studied ornaments and bits for effect,[3193] coated by dint of time and labor, with the academic varnish, the glitter of symmetrical antitheses, rounded periods, exclamations, omissions, apostrophes and other tricks of the pen.[3194]—In the most famous and important of his reports,[3195] I have counted eighty-four instances of personifications[3196] imitated from Rousseau and the antique, many of them largely expanded, some addressed to the dead, to Brutus, to young Barra, and others to absentees, priests, and aristocrats, to the unfortunate, to French women, and finally to abstract substantives like Liberty and Friendship. With unshaken conviction and intense satisfaction, he deems himself an orator because he harps on the same old tune. There is not one true tone in his elaborate eloquence, nothing but recipes and only those of a worn-out art, Greek and Roman common-places, Socrates and the hemlock, Brutus and his dagger, classic metaphors like "the flambeaux of discord," and "the vessel of State,"[3197]s coupled together and beauties of style which a pupil in rhetoric aims at on the college bench;[3198]times a grand bravura air, so essential for parade in public;[3199] centimes a delicate strain of the flute, for, in those days, one must have a tender heart;[31100] in short, Marmontel's method in "Belisarius," or that of Thomas in his "Eloges," all borrowed from Rousseau, but of inferior quality, like a sharp, thin voice strained to imitate a rich, powerful voice. All is a sort of involuntary parody, and the more repulsive because a word ends in a blow, because a sentimental, declamatory Trissotin poses as statesman, because the studied elegance of the closet become pistol shots aimed at living breasts, because an epithet skillfully directed sends a man to the guillotine.—The contrast is too great between his talent and the part he plays. With such a talent, as mediocre and false as his intellect, there is no employment for which he is less suited than that of governing men; he was cut out for another, which, in a peaceable community, he would have been able to do. Suppress the Revolution, and Marat would have probably ended his days in an asylum. Danton might possibly have become a legal filibuster, a highwayman or gangster, and finally throttled or hung. Robespierre, on the contrary, might have continued as he began,[31101] a busy, hard-working lawyer of good standing, member of the Arras Academy, winner of competitive prizes, author of literary eulogies, moral essays and philanthropic pamphlets; his little lamp, lighted like hundreds of others of equal capacity at the focus of the new philosophy, would have burned moderately without doing harm to any one, and diffused over a provincial circle a dim, commonplace illumination proportionate to the little oil his lamp would hold.
But the Revolution bore him into the Constituent Assembly, where, for a long time on this great stage, his amour propre, the dominant feeling of the pedant, suffered terribly. He had already suffered on this score from his earliest youth, and his wounds being still fresh made him only the more sensitive.—Born in Arras in 1758, orphaned and poor, protégé of his bishop, a bursar through favor at the college Louis-le-Grand, later a clerk with Brissot under the revolutionary system of law-practice, and at length settled down in his gloomy rue des Rapporteurs as a pettifogger. Living with a bad-tempered sister, he has adopts Rousseau, whom he had once seen and whom he ardently studies, for his master in philosophy, politics and style. Fancying, probably, like other young men of his age and condition, that he could play a similar part and thus emerge from his blind alley, he published law pleadings for effect, contended for Academy prizes, and read papers before his Arras colleagues. His success was moderate: one of his harangues obtained a notice in the Artois Almanac; the Academy of Metz awarded him only a second prize; that of Amiens gave him no prize, while the critic of the "Mercure" spoke of his style as smacking of the provinces.—In the National Assembly, eclipsed by men of great and spontaneous ability, he remains a long time in the shade, and, more than once, through obstination or lack of tact, makes himself ridiculous. With his sharp, thin, attorney's visage, "dull, monotonous, coarse voice and wearisome delivery,"—"an artesian accent" and constrained air,[31102] his constantly putting himself forward, his elaboration of commonplaces, his evident determination to impose on cultivated people, still a body of intelligent listeners, and the intolerable boredom he caused them—all this is not calculated to render the Assembly indulgent to errors of sense and taste.[31103] One day, referring to certain acts of the "Conseil:" "It is necessary that a noble and simple formula should announce national rights and carry respect for law into the hearts of the people. Consequently, in the decrees as promulgated, after the words Louis, by the grace of God," etc., these words should follow:
"People, behold the law imposed on you! Let this law be considered sacred and inviolable for all!" Upon this, a Gascon deputy arises and remarks in his southern accent, "Gentlemen, this style is unsuitable—there is no need for sermons.[31104] (cantique)."
General laughter; Robespierre keeps silent and bleeds internally: two or three such mishaps nettle such a man from head to foot. It is not that his stupid remarks seem silly to him; no pedant taken in the act and hissed would avow that he deserved such treatment; on the contrary, he is content to have spoken as becomes a philosophic and moral legislator, and so much the worse for the narrow minds and corrupt hearts unable to comprehend him.—Thrown back upon himself, his wounded vanity seeks inward nourishment and takes what it can find in the sterile uniformity of his bourgeois moderation. Robespierre, unlike Danton, has no cravings. He is sober; he is not tormented by his senses; if he gives way to them, it is only no further than he can help, and with a bad grace. In the rue Saintonge in Paris, "for seven months," says his secretary,[31105] "I knew of but one woman that he kept company with, and he did not treat her very well. .. very often he would not let her enter his room": when busy, he must not be disturbed. He is naturally steady, hard-working, studious and fond of seclusion, at college a model pupil, at home in his province an attentive advocate, a punctual deputy in the Assembly, everywhere free of temptation and incapable of going astray.—"Irreproachable" is the word which from early youth an inward voice constantly repeats to him in low tones to console him for obscurity and patience. Thus has he ever been, is now, and ever will be; he says this to himself, tells others so, and on this foundation, all of a piece, he builds up his character. He is not, like Desmoulins, to be seduced by dinners, like Barnave, by flattery, like Mirabeau and Danton, by money, like the Girondists, by the insinuating charm of ancient politeness and select society, like the Dantonists, by the bait of joviality and unbounded license—he is the incorruptible. He is not to be deterred or diverted, like the Feuillants, Girondists, and Dantonists, like statesmen or specialists, by considerations of a lower order, by regard for interests or respect for acquired positions, by the danger of undertaking too much at once, by the necessity of not disorganizing the service and of giving play to human passions, motives of utility and opportunity: he is the uncompromising champion of the right.[31106] "Alone, or nearly alone, I do not allow myself to be corrupted; alone or nearly alone, I do not compromise justice; which two merits I possess in the highest degree. A few others may live correctly, but they oppose or betray principles; a few others profess to have principles, but they do not live correctly. No one else leads so pure a life or is so loyal to principles; no one else joins to so fervent a worship of truth so strict a practice of virtue: I am the unique."—What can be more agreeable than this mute soliloquy? From the very first day it can be heard toned down in Robespierre's address to the Third-Estate of Arras;[31107] the last day it is spoken aloud in his great speech in the Convention;[31108] during the interval, it crops out and shines through all his compositions, harangues, or reports, in exordiums, parentheses and perorations, permeating every sentence like the drone of a bag-pipe.[31109]—Through the delight he takes in this he can listen to nothing else, and it is just here that the outward echoes supervene and sustain with their accompaniment the inward cantata which he sings to his own glory. Towards the end of the Constituent Assembly, through the withdrawal or the elimination of every man at all able or competent, he becomes one of the conspicuous tenors on the political stage, while in the Jacobin Club he is decidedly the tenor most in vogue.—"Unique competitor of the Roman Fabricius," writes the branch club at Marseilles to him; "immortal defender of popular rights," says the Jacobin crew of Bourges.[31110] One of two portraits of him in the exhibition of 1791 bears the inscription: "The Incorruptible." At the Moliere Theatre a drama of the day represents him as launching the thunderbolts of his logic and virtue at Rohan and Condé. On his way, at Bapaume, the patriots of the place, the National Guard on the road and the authorities, come in a body to honor the great man. The town of Arras is illuminated on his arrival. On the adjournment of the Constituent Assembly the people in the street greet him with shouts, crown him with oak wreaths, take the horses from his cab and drag him in triumph to the rue St. Honoré, where he lodges with the carpenter Duplay.—Here, in one of those families in which the semi-bourgeois class borders on the people, whose minds are unsophisticated, and on whom glittering generalities and oratorical tirades take full hold, he finds his worshippers; they drink in his words; they have the same opinion of him that he has of himself; to every person in the house, husband, wife and daughter, he is the great patriot, the infallible sage; he bestows benedictions night and morning; he inhales clouds of incense; he is a god at home. The faithful, to obtain access to him form a line in the court.[31111] One by one they are admitted into the reception room, where they gather around portraits of him drawn with pencil, in stump, in sepia and in water color, and before miniature busts in red or gray plaster. Then, on the signal being given by him, they penetrate through a glass door into the sanctuary where he presides, into the private closet in which the best bust of him, with verses and mottoes, replaces him during his absence.—His worshippers adore him on their knees, and the women more than the men. On the day he delivers his apology before the Convention "the passages are lined with women[31112].... seven or eight hundred of them in the galleries, and but two hundred men at most;" and how frantically they cheer him! He is a priest surrounded by devotees."[31113] In the Jacobin club, when he delivers his "amphigory," there are sobs of emotion, "outcries and stamping of feet almost making the house tumble."[31114] An onlooker who shows no emotion is greeted with murmurs and obliged to slip out, like a heretic that has strayed into a church on the elevation of the Host.—The faster the revolutionary thunderbolts fall on other heads, so does Robespierre mount higher and higher in glory and deification. Letters are addressed to him as "the founder of the Republic, the incorruptible genius who foresees all and saves all, who can neither be deceived nor seduced;"[31115] who has "the energy of a Spartan and the eloquence of an Athenian;"[31116] "who shields the Republic with the aegis of his eloquence;"[31117] who "illuminates the universe with his writings, fills the world with his renown and regenerates the human species here below;"[31118] whose" name is now, and will be, held in veneration for all ages, present and to come;"[31119] who is "the Messiah promised by the Eternal for universal reform."[31120] An extraordinary popularity," says Billaud-Varennes,[31121] a popularity which, founded under the Constituent Assembly, "only increased during the Legislative Assembly," and, later on, so much more, that, "in the National Convention he soon found himself the only one able to fix attention on his person.... and control public opinion.... With this ascendancy over public opinion, with this irresistible preponderance, when he reached the Committee of Public Safety, he was already the most important being in France." After three years, a chorus of a thousand voices,[31122] which he formed and directs, repeats again and again in unison his litany, his personal creed, a hymn of three stanzas composed by him in his own honor, and which he daily recites to himself in a low tone of voice, and often in a loud one:
"Robespierre alone has discovered the best type of citizen! Robespierre alone, modestly and without shortcomings, fits the description! Robespierre alone is worthy of and able to lead the Revolution!"[31123]
Cool infatuation carried thus far is equivalent to a raging fever, and Robespierre almost attains to the ideas and the ravings of Marat.
First, in his own eyes, he, like Marat, is a persecuted man, and, like Marat, he poses himself as a "martyr," but more skillfully and keeping within bounds, affecting the resigned and tender air of an innocent victim, who, offering himself as a sacrifice, ascends to Heaven, bequeathing to mankind the imperishable souvenir of his virtues.[31124]
"I arouse against me the pride of everybody;[31125] I sharpen against me a thousand daggers. I am a sacrifice to every species of hatred. ... It is certain that my head will atone for the truths I have uttered. I have given my life, and shall welcome death almost as a boon. It is, perhaps, Heaven's will that my blood should indicate the pathway of my country to happiness and freedom. With what joy I accept this glorious destiny!"[31126]—
"It is hardly in order to live that one declares war against tyrants, and, what is still more dangerous, against miscreants.... The greater their eagerness to put an end to my career here below, the more eager I shall be to fill it with actions serving the welfare of my fellow-creatures."[31127]
"All these offenders outrage me;[31128] actions which to others may appear insignificant or completely legitimate are for me crimes. As soon as someone becomes acquainted with me he is at once calumniated. Others are forgiven for their fortune, my zeal is considered a crime. Deprive me of my conscience and I am the most wretched of men. I do not even enjoy the rights of a citizen. I am not even allowed to perform my duty as a representative of the people.... To the enemies of my country, to whom my existence seems an obstacle to their heinous plots, I am ready to sacrifice it, if their odious empire is to endure..... Let their road to the scaffold be the pathway of crime, ours shall be that of virtue; let the hemlock be got ready for me, I await it on this hallowed spot. I shall at least bequeath to my country an example of constant affection for it, and to the enemies of humanity the disgrace of my death."
Naturally, and always just like Marat, he sees around himself only "the perverted, the plotters, the traitors."[31129]—Naturally, as with Marat, common sense with him is perverted, and, like Marat again, he thinks at random.
"I am not obliged to reflect," said he to Garat, "I always rely on first impressions."
"For him," says the same authority, "the best reasons are suspicions,"[31130] and naught makes headway against suspicions, not even the most positive evidence. On September 4, 1792, talking confidentially with Pétion, and hard pressed with the questions that he put to him, he ends by saying, "Very well, I think that Brissot is on Brunswick's side."[31131]—Naturally, finally, he, like Marat, imagines the darkest fictions, but they are less improvised, less grossly absurd, more slowly worked out and more industriously interwoven in his calculating inquisitorial brain.
"Evidently," he says to Garat, "the Girondists are conspiring."[31132]
"And where?" demands Garat.
"Everywhere," Robespierre replies, "in Paris, throughout France, over all Europe. Gensonné, at Paris, is plotting in the Faubourg St. Antoine, going about among the shopkeepers and persuading them that we patriots mean to pillage their shops. The Gironde (department) has for a long time been plotting its separation from France so as to join England; the chiefs of its deputation are at the head of the plot, and mean to carry it out at any cost. Gensonné makes no secret of it; he tells all among them who will listen to him that they are not representatives of the nation, but plenipotentiaries of the Gironde. Brissot is plotting in his journal, which is simply a tocsin of civil war; we know of his going to England, and why he went; we know all about his intimacy with that Lebrun, minister of foreign affairs, a Liegois and creature of the Austrian house. Brissot's best friend is Clavière, and Clavière has plotted wherever he could breathe. Rabaut, treacherous like the Protestant and philosopher that he is, was not clever enough to conceal his correspondence with that courtier and traitor Montesquiou; six months ago they were working together to open Savoy and France to the Piedmontese. Servan was made general of the Pyrenean army only to give the keys of France to the Spaniards."
"Is there no doubt of this in your mind?" asks Garat.
"None, whatever."[31133]
Such assurance, equal to that of Marat, is terrible and worse in its effect, for Robespierre's list of conspirators is longer than that of Marat. Political and social, in Marat's mind, the list comprehends only aristocrats and the rich; theological and moral in Robespierre's mind, it comprehends all atheists and dishonest persons, that is to say, nearly the whole of his party. In this narrow mind, given up to abstractions and habitually classifying men under two opposite headings, whoever is not with him on the good side is against him on the bad side, and, on the bad side, the common understanding between the factious of every flag and the rogues of every degree, is natural.
"All aristocrats are corrupt, and every corrupt man is an aristocrat;" for, "republican government and public morality are one and the same thing."[31134]
Not only do evil-doers of both species tend through instinct and interest to league together, but their league is already perfected. One has only to open one's eyes to detect "in all its extent" the plot they have hatched, "the frightful system of destruction of public morality."[31135] Guadet, Vergniaud, Gensonné, Danton, Hébert, "all of them artificial characters," had no other end in view: "they felt[31136] that, to destroy liberty, it was necessary to favor by every means whatever tended to justify egoism, wither the heart and efface that idea of moral beauty, which affords the only rule for public reason in its judgment of the defenders and enemies of humanity."—Their heirs remain; but let those be careful. Immorality is a political offense; one conspires against the State merely by making a parade of materialism or by preaching indulgence, by acting scandalously, or by following evil courses, by stock-jobbing, by dining too sumptuously; by being vicious, scheming, given to exaggeration, or "on the fence;" by exciting or perverting the people, by deceiving the people, by finding fault with the people, by distrusting the people,[31137] short, when one does not march straight along on the prescribed path marked out by Robespierre according to principles: whoever stumbles or turns aside is a scoundrel, a traitor. Now, not counting the Royalists, Feuillantists, Girondists, Hébertists, Dantonists, and others already decapitated or imprisoned according to their merit, how many traitors still remain in the Convention, on the Committees, amongst the representatives on mission, in the administrative bodies not properly weeded out, amongst petty tyrannical underlings and the entire ruling, influential class at Paris and in the provinces? Outside of "about twenty political Trappists in the Convention," outside of a small devoted group of pure Jacobins in Paris, outside of a faithful few scattered among the popular clubs of the departments, how many Fouchés, Vadiers, Talliens, Bourdons, Collots, remain amongst the so-called revolutionaries? How many dissidents are there, disguised as orthodox, charlatans disguised as patriots, and pashas disguised as sans-culottes?[31138] Add all this vermin to that which Marat seeks to crush out; it is no longer by hundreds of thousands, but by millions, exclaim Baudot, Jeanbon-Saint-André and Guffroy, that the guilty must be counted and cut off their heads!—And all these heads, Robespierre, according to his maxims, must strike off. He is well aware of this; hostile as his intellect may be to precise ideas, he, when alone in his closet, face to face with himself, sees clearly, as clearly as Marat. Marat's chimera, on first spreading out its wings, bore its frenzied rider swiftly onward to the charnel house; that of Robespierre, fluttering and hobbling along, reaches the goal in its turn; in its turn, it demands something to feed on, and the rhetorician, the professor of principles, begins to assess the voracity of the monstrous brute on which he is mounted. Slower than the other, this one is still more ravenous, for, with similar claws and teeth, it has a vaster appetite. At the end of three years Robespierre has overtaken Marat, at that distant end of the line, at the station where Marat had established himself from the very beginning, and the theoretician now adopts the policy, the aim, the means, the work, and almost the vocabulary of a maniac:[31139]
armed dictatorship of the urban mob,
systematic perturbation of the bribed rabble,
war against the bourgeoisie,
extermination of the rich,
placing opposition writers, administrators and deputies outside the law.
Both monsters get the same food; only, to the ration of his monster, Robespierre adds "vicious men" as its special and favorite prey. Henceforth, he may in vain abstain from action, take refuge in his rhetoric, stop his chaste ears, and raise his hypocritical eyes to heaven, he cannot avoid seeing or hearing under his immaculate feet the streaming gore, and the bones crashing in the open jaws of the insatiable monster which he has fashioned and on which he rides.[31140] These ever open and hungry jaws must be daily fed with an ampler supply of human flesh; not only is he bound to let it eat, but to furnish the food, often with his own hands, except that he must afterwards wash them, declaring, and even believing, that no spot of blood has ever soiled them. He is generally content to caress and flatter the brute, to excuse it, to let it go on. Nevertheless, more than once, tempted by the opportunity, he has launched it against his designated victim.[31141] He is now himself starting off in quest of living prey; he casts the net of his rhetoric[31142] around it; he fetches it bound to the open jaws; he thrusts aside with an uncompromising air the arms of friends, wives and mothers, the outstretched hands of suppliants begging for lives;[31143] he suddenly throttles the struggling victims[31144] and, for fear that they might escape, he strangles them in time. Near the end, this is no longer enough; the brute must have grander quarries, and, accordingly, a pack of hounds, beaters-up, and, willingly or not, it is Robespierre who equips, directs and urges them on, at Orange, at Paris,[31145] ordering them to empty the prison's, and be expeditious in doing their work.—In this profession of slaughtering, destructive instincts, long repressed by civilization, become aroused. His feline physiognomy, at first "that of a domestic cat, restless but mild, changes into the savage appearance of the wildcat, and close to the ferocious exterior of the tiger. In the Constituent Assembly he speaks with a whine, in the Convention he froths at the mouth."[31146] The monotonous drone of a stiff sub-professor changes into the personal accent of furious passion; he hisses and grinds his teeth;[31147] Sometimes, on a change of scene, he affects to shed tears.[31148] But his wildest outbursts are less alarming than his affected sensibility. The festering grudges, corrosive envies and bitter scheming which have accumulated in his breast are astonishing. The gall bladder is full, and the extravasated gall overflows on the dead. He never tires of re-executing his guillotined adversaries, the Girondists, Chaumette, Hébert and especially Danton,[31149] probably because Danton was the active agent in the Revolution of which he was simply the incapable pedagogue; he vents his posthumous hatred on this still warm corpse in artful insinuations and obvious misrepresentations. Thus, inwardly corroded by the venom it distills, his physical machine gets out of order, like that of Marat, but with other symptoms. When speaking in the tribune "his hands crisp with a sort of nervous contraction;" sudden tremors agitate "his shoulders and neck, shaking him convulsively to and fro."[31150] "His bilious complexion becomes livid," his eyelids quiver under his spectacles, and how he looks! "Ah," said a Montagnard, "you would have voted as we did on the 9th of Thermidor, had you seen his green eyeballs!" "Physically as well as morally," he becomes a second Marat, suffering all the more because his delirium is not steady, and because his policy, being a moral one, forces him to exterminate on a grander scale.
But he is a discreet Marat, of a timid temperament, anxious,[31151] keeping his thoughts to himself, made for a school-master or a pleader, but not for taking the lead or for governing, always acting hesitatingly, and ambitious to be rather the pope, than the dictator of the Revolution.[31152] Above all, he wants to remain a political Grandison[31153]; until the very end, he keeps his mask, not only in public but also to himself and in his inmost conscience. The mask, indeed, has adhered to his skin; he can no longer distinguish one from the other; never did an impostor more carefully conceal intentions and acts under sophisms, and persuade himself that the mask was his face, and that in telling a lie, he told the truth.
Taking his word for it, he had nothing to do with the September events.[31154] "Previous to these events, he had ceased to attend the General Council of the Commune... He no longer went there." He was not charged with any duty, he had no influence there; he had not provoked the arrest and murder of the Girondists.[31155] All he did was to "speak frankly concerning certain members of the Committee of Twenty-one;" as "a magistrate" and "one of a municipal assembly." Should he not" explain himself freely on the authors of a dangerous plot?" Besides, the Commune "far from provoking the 2nd of September did all in its power to prevent it." After all, only one innocent person perished, "which is undoubtedly one too many. Citizens, mourn over this cruel mistake; we too have long mourned over it! But, as all things human come to an end, let your tears cease to flow." When the sovereign people resumes its delegated power and exercises its inalienable rights, we have only to bow our heads.—Moreover, it is just, wise and good "in all that it undertakes, all is virtue and truth; nothing can be excess, error or crime."[31156] It must intervene when its true representatives are hampered by the law "let it assemble in its sections and compel the arrest of faithless deputies."[31157] What is more legal than such a motion, which is the only part Robespierre took on the 31st of May. He is too scrupulous to commit or prescribe an illegal act. That will do for the Dantons, the Marats, men of relaxed morals or excited brains, who if need be, tramp in the gutters and roll up their shirt-sleeves; as to himself, he can do nothing that would ostensibly derange or soil the dress proper to an honest man and irreproachable citizen. In the Committee of Public Safety, he merely executes the decrees of the Convention, and the Convention is always free. He a dictator! He is merely one of seven hundred deputies, and his authority, if he has any, is simply the legitimate ascendancy of reason and virtue.[31158] He a murderer! If he has denounced conspirators, it is the Convention which summons these before the revolutionary Tribunal,[31159] and the revolutionary Tribunal pronounces judgment on them. He a terrorist! He merely seeks to simplify the established proceedings, so as to secure a speedier release of the innocent, the punishment of the guilty, and the final purgation that is to render liberty and morals the order of the day.[31160]—Before uttering all this he almost believes it, and, when he has uttered it he believes it fully.[31161] When nature and history combine, to produce a character, they succeed better than man's imagination. Neither Molière in his "Tartuffe," nor Shakespeare in his "Richard III.," dared bring on the stage a hypocrite believing himself sincere, and a Cain that regarded himself as an Abel.[31162] There he stands on a colossal stage, in the presence of a hundred thousand spectators, on the 8th of June, 1794, the most glorious day of his life, at that fête in honor of the Supreme Being, which is the glorious triumph of his doctrine and the official consecration of his papacy. Two characters are found in Robespierre, as in the Revolution which he represents: one, apparent, paraded, external, and the other hidden, dissembled, inward, the latter being overlaid by the former.—The first one all for show, fashioned out of purely cerebral cogitations, is as artificial as the solemn farce going on around him. According to David's programme, the cavalcade of supernumeraries who file in front of an allegorical mountain, gesticulate and shout at the command, and under the eyes, of Henriot and his gendarmes,[31163] manifesting at the appointed time the emotions which are prescribed for them. At five o'clock in the morning
"friends, husbands, wives, relations and children will embrace.... The old man, his eyes streaming with tears of joy, feels himself rejuvenated."
At two o'clock, on the turf-laid terraces of the sacred mountain,
"all will show a state of commotion and excitement: mothers here press to their bosoms the infants they suckle, and there offer them up in homage to the author of Nature, while youths, aglow with the ardor of battle, simultaneously draw their swords and hand them to their venerable fathers. Sharing in the enthusiasm of their sons, the deported old men embrace them and bestow on them the paternal benediction..... All the men distributed around the 'Field of Reunion' sing in chorus the (first) refrain.... All the Women distributed around the 'Field of Reunion' sing in unison the (second) refrain.... All Frenchmen partake of each other's sentiments in one grand fraternal embrace."
What could better than such an idyll, ruled with an iron hand, in the presence of moral symbols and colored pasteboard divinities, could better please the counterfeit moralist, unable to distinguish the false from the true, and whose skin-deep sensibility is borrowed from sentimental authors! "For the first time" his glowing countenance beams with joy, while "the enthusiasm"[31164] of the scribe overflows, as usual, in book phraseology.
"Behold!" he exclaims, "that which is most interesting in humanity! The Universe is here assembled! O, Nature, how sublime, how exquisite is thy power! How tyrants must quail at the contemplation of this festival!"
Is not he himself its most dazzling ornament? Was not he unanimously chosen to preside over the Convention and conduct the ceremonies? Is he not the founder of the new cult, the only pure worship on the face of the earth, approved of by morality and reason? Wearing the uniform of a representative, nankeen breeches, blue coat, tri-colored sash and plumed hat,[31165] holding in his hand a bouquet of flowers and grain, he marches at the head of the Convention and officiates on the platform; he sets fire to the veil which hides from view the idol representing "Atheism," and suddenly, through an ingenious contrivance, the majestic statue of "Wisdom" appears in its place. He then addresses the crowd, over and over again, exhorting, apostrophizing, preaching, elevating his soul to the Supreme Being, and with what oratorical combinations! What an academic swell of bombastic cadences, strung together to enforce his tirades! How cunning the even balance of adjective and substantive![31166] From these faded rhetorical flowers, arranged as if for a prize distribution or a funeral oration, exhales a sanctimonious, collegiate odor which he complacently breathes, and which intoxicates him. At this moment, he must certainly be in earnest; there is no hesitation or reserve in his self-admiration; he is not only in his own eyes a great writer and great orator, but a great statesman and great citizen his artificial, philosophic conscience awards him only praise.—But look underneath, or rather wait a moment. Signs of impatience and antipathy appear behind his back: Lecointre has braved him openly; numerous insults, and, worse than these, sarcasms, reach his ears. On such an occasion, and in such a place! Against the pontiff of Truth, the apostle of Virtue! The miscreants, how dare they! Silent and pale, he suppresses his rage, and,[31167] losing his balance, closing his eyes, he plunges headlong on the path of murder: cost what it will, the miscreants must perish and without loss of time. To expedite matters, he must get their heads off quietly, and as "up to this time things have been managed confidentially in the Committee of Public Safety," he, alone with Couthon, two days after, without informing his colleagues,[31168] draws up, brings to the Convention, and has passed the terrible act of Prairial which places everybody's life at his disposal.—In his crafty, blundering haste, he has demanded too much; each one, on reflection, becomes alarmed for himself; he is compelled to back out, to protest that he is misunderstood, admit that representatives are excepted, and, accordingly, to sheathe the knife he has already applied to his adversaries throats. But he still holds it in his grasp. He watches them, and, pretending to retreat, affects a renunciation, crouched in his corner,[31169] waiting until they discredit themselves, so as to spring upon them a second time. He has not to wait long, for the exterminating machine he set up on the 22nd of Prairial, is in their hands, and it has to work as he planned it, namely, by making rapid turns and almost haphazard: the odium of a blind sweeping massacre rests with them; he not only makes no opposition to this, but, while pretending to abstain from it, he urges it on. Secluded in the private office of his secret police, he orders arrests;[31170] he sends out his principal bloodhound, Herman; he first signs and then dispatches the resolution by which it is supposed that there are conspirators among those in confinement and which, authorizing spies or paid informers, is to provide the guillotine with those vast batches which purge and clean prisons out in a trice."[31171]—"I am not responsible," he states later on...." My lack of power to do any good, to arrest the evil, forced me for more than six weeks to abandon my post on the Committee of Public Safety."[31172] To ruin his adversaries by murders committed by him, by those which he makes them commit and which he imputes to them, to whitewash himself and blacken them with the same stroke of the brush, what intense delight! If the natural conscience murmurs in whispers at moments, the acquired superposed conscience immediately imposes silence, concealing personal hatreds under public pretexts: the guillotined, after all, were aristocrats, and whoever comes under the guillotine is immoral. Thus, the means are good and the end better; in employing the means, as well as in pursuing the end, the function is sacerdotal.
Such is the scenic exterior of the Revolution, a specious mask with a hideous visage beneath it, under the reign of a nominal humanitarian theory, covering over the effective dictatorship of evil and low passions. In its true representative, as in itself, we see ferocity issuing from philanthropy, and, from the pedant (cuistre), the executioner.
3101 ([return])
[ Harmand (de la Meuse): "Anecdotes relatives à la Revolution." "He was dressed like a tough cab-driver. He had a disturbed look and an eye always in motion; he acted in an abrupt, quick and jerky way. A constant restlessness gave a convulsive contraction to his muscles and features which likewise affected his manner of walking so that he didn't walk but hopped.">[
3102 ([return])
[ Chevremont, "Jean Paul Marat;" also Alfred Bougeard, "Marat" passim. These two works, with numerous documents, are panegyrics of Marat.—Bougeat, I., II (description of Marat by Fabre d'Eglantine); II., 259 and I., 83.—"Journal de la Republique Française," by Marat, No.93, January 9, 1793. "I devote only two out of the twenty four hours to sleep, and only one hour to my meals, toilette and domestic necessities... I have not taken fifteen minutes recreation for more than three years.">[
3103 ([return])
[ Chevremont, I., pp. I and 2. His family, on the father's side, was Spanish, long settled in Sardinia. The father, Dr. Jean Mara, had abandoned Catholicism and removed to Geneva where he married a woman of that city; he afterwards established himself in the canton of Neufchatel.]
3104 ([return])
[ "Journal de la République Française" No.98, description of "l'Ami du peuple" by himself.]
3105 ([return])
[ Read his novel "Les Aventures du jeune comte Potowski," letter 5, by Lucile: "I think of Potowski only. My imagination, inflamed at the torch of love, ever presents to me his sweet image." Letter of Potowski after his marriage. "Lucile now grants to love all that modesty permits... enjoying such transports of bliss, I believe that the gods are jealous of my lot.">[
3106 ([return])
[ Preface, XX. "Descartes, Helvetius, Haller, Lelat all ignored great principles; Man, with them, is an enigma, an impenetrable secret." He says in a foot-note, "We find evidence of this in the works of Hume, Voltaire, Bonnet, Racine and Pascal.">[
3107 ([return])
[ "Mémoires Académiques sur la Lumière," pref., VII.—He especially opposes "the differential refrangibility of heterogeneous rays" which is "the basis of Newton's theory.">[
3108 ([return])
[ Chevremont, I., 74. (See the testimony of Arago, Feb.24, 1844).]
3109 ([return])
[ Ibid., I., 104. (Sketch of a declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen).]
3110 ([return])
[ See the epigraph of his "Mémoires sur la Lumiere." "They will force their way against wind and tide."—Ibid., preface, VII. "Déconvertes de Monsieur Marat," 1780, 2nd ed., p. 140.]
3111 ([return])
[ "Recherches physiques sur l'electricité," 1782, pp.13, 17.]
3112 ([return])
[ Chevremont, I., 59.]
3113 ([return])
[ "De l'Homme," preface VII. and book IV.]
3114 ([return])
[ "Journal de la République Française," No 98.]
3115 ([return])
[ "Journal de la République Française," by Marat, No. I.]
3116 ([return])
[ "L'Ami du Peuple" No. 173. (July 26, 1790). The memories of conceited persons, given to immoderate self-expansion, are largely at fault. I have seen patients in asylums who, believing in their exalted position, have recounted their successes in about the same vein as Marat. (Chevremont, I., 40, 47, 54). "The reports of extraordinary cures effected by me brought me a great crowd of the sick. The street in front of my door was blocked with carriages. People came to consult me from all quarters.... The abstract of my experiments on Light finally appeared and it created a prodigious sensation throughout Europe; the newspapers were all filled with it. I had the court and the town in my house for six months.... The Academy, finding that it could not stifle my discoveries tried to make it appear that they had emanated from its body." Three academic bodies came in turn the same day to see if he would not present himself as a candidate.—"Up to the present time several crowned heads have sought me and always on account of the fame of my works.">[
3117 ([return])
[ "Journal de la République Française," July 6 1793.]