CHAPTER III
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE CONVENTION
1. The Legend of the Convention.
The history of the Convention is not merely fertile in psychological documents. It also shows how powerless the witnesses of any period and even their immediate successors are to form an exact idea of the events which they have witnessed, and the men who have surrounded them.
More than a century has elapsed since the Revolution, and men are only just beginning to form judgments concerning this period which, if still often doubtful enough, are slightly more accurate than of old.
This happens, not only because new documents are being drawn from the archives, but because the legends which enveloped that sanguinary period in a magical cloud are gradually vanishing with the passage of time.
Perhaps the most tenacious legend of all was that which until formerly used to surround the personages to whom our fathers applied the glorious epithet, ``the Giants of the Convention.''
The struggles of the Convention against France in insurrection and Europe in arms produced such an impression that the heroes of this formidable struggle seemed to belong to a race of supermen or Titans.
The epithet ``giant'' seemed justified so long as the events of the period were confused and massed together. Regarded as connected when it was simply simultaneous, the work of the armies was confounded with that of the Convention. The glory of the first recoiled upon the second, and served as an excuse for the hecatombs of the Terror, the ferocity of the civil war, and the devastation of France.
Under the penetrating scrutiny of modern criticism, the heterogeneous mass of events has been slowly disentangled. The armies of the Republic have retained their old prestige, but we have been forced to recognise that the men of the Convention, absorbed entirely by their intestine conflicts, had very little to do with their victories. At the most two or three members of the committees of the Assembly were concerned with the armies, and the fact that they were victorious was due, apart from their numbers and the talents of their young generals, to the enthusiasm with which a new faith had inspired them.
In a later chapter, devoted to the revolutionary armies, we shall see how they conquered Europe in arms. They set out inspired by the ideas of liberty and equality which constituted the new gospel, and once on the frontiers, which were to keep them so long, they retained a special mentality, very different from that of the Government, which they first knew nothing of and afterwards despised.
Having no part whatever in their victories, the men of the Convention contented themselves with legislating at hazard according to the injunctions of the leaders who directed them, and who claimed to be regenerating France by means of the guillotine.
But it was thanks to these valiant armies that the history of the Convention was transformed into an apotheosis which affected several generations with a religious respect which even to-day is hardly extinct.
Studying in detail the psychology of the ``Giants'' of the Convention, we find their magnitude shrink very rapidly. They were in general extremely mediocre. Their most fervent defenders, such as M. Aulard, are obliged to admit as much.
This is how M. Aulard puts it in his History of the French
Revolution:—
``It has been said that the generation which from 1789 to 1799 did such great and terrible things was a generation of giants, or, to put it more plainly, that it was a generation more distinguished than that which preceded it or that which followed.
This is a retrospective illusion. The citizens who formed the municipal and Jacobin or nationalist groups by which the Revolution was effected do not seem to have been superior, either in enlightenment or in talents, to the Frenchmen of the time of Louis XV. or of Louis Philippe. Were those exceptionally gifted whose names history has retained because they appeared on the stage of Paris, or because they were the most brilliant orators of the various revolutionary Assemblies? Mirabeau, up to a certain point, deserved the title of genius; but as to the rest— Robespierre, Danton, Vergniaud—had they truly more talent, for example, than our modern orators? In 1793, in the time of the supposed `giants,' Mme. Roland wrote in her memoirs: `France was as though drained of men; their dearth during this revolution is truly surprising; there have scarcely been any but pigmies.' ''
If after considering the men of the Convention individually we consider them in a body, we may say that they did not shine either by intelligence or by virtue or by courage. Never did a body of men manifest such pusillanimity. They had no courage save in their speeches or in respect of remote dangers. This Assembly, so proud and threatening in its speech when addressing royalty, was perhaps the most timid and docile political collectivity that the world has ever known. We see it slavishly obedient to the orders of the clubs and the Commune, trembling before the popular delegations which invaded it daily, and obeying the injunctions of the rioters to the point of handing over to them its most brilliant members. The Convention affords the world a melancholy spectacle, voting, at the popular behest, laws so absurd that it is obliged to annul them as soon as the rioters have quitted the hall.
Few Assemblies have given proof of such weakness. When we wish to show how low a popular Government can fall we have only to point to the Convention.
2. Results of the Triumph of the Jacobin Religion
Among the causes that gave the Convention its special physiognomy, one of the most important was the definite establishment of a revolutionary religion. A dogma which was at first in process of formation was at last finally erected.
This dogma was composed of an aggregate of somewhat inconsistent elements. Nature, the rights of man, liberty, equality, the social contract, hatred of tyrants, and popular sovereignty formed the articles of a gospel which, to its disciples, was above discussion. The new truths had found apostles who were certain of their power, and who finally, like believers all the world over, sought to impose them by force. No heed should be taken of the opinion of unbelievers; they all deserved to be exterminated.
The hatred of heretics having been always, as we have seen, in respect of the Reformation, an irreducible characteristic of great beliefs, we can readily comprehend the intolerance of the Jacobin religion.
The history of the Reformation proves also that the conflict between two allied beliefs is very bitter. We must not, therefore, be astonished that in the Convention the Jacobins fought furiously against the other republicans, whose faith hardly differed from their own.
The propaganda of the new apostles was very energetic. To convert the provinces they sent thither zealous disciples escorted by guillotines. The inquisitors of the new faith would have no paltering with error. As Robespierre said, ``The republic is the destruction of everything that is opposed to it.'' What matter that the country refused to be regenerated? It should be regenerated despite itself. ``We will make a cemetery of France,'' said Carrier, ``rather than fail to regenerate it in our own way.''
The Jacobin policy derived from the new faith was very simple. It consisted in a sort of equalitarian Socialism, directed by a dictatorship which would brook no opposition.
Of practical ideas consistent with the economic necessities and the true nature of man, the theorists who ruled France would have nothing to say. Speech and the guillotine sufficed them. Their speeches were childish. ``Never a fact,'' says Taine, ``nothing but abstractions, strings of sentences about Nature, reason, the people, tyrants, liberty: like so many puffed-out balloons uselessly jostling in space. If we did not know that it all ended in practical and dreadful results, we should think they were games of logic, school exercises, academical demonstrations, ideological combinations.''
The theories of the Jacobins amounted practically to an absolute tyranny. To them it seemed evident that a sovereign State must be obeyed without discussion by citizens rendered equal as to conditions and fortune.
The power with which they invested themselves was far greater than that of the monarchs who had preceded them. They fixed the prices of merchandise and arrogated the right to dispose of the life and property of citizens.
Their confidence in the regenerative virtues of the revolutionary faith was such that after having declared war upon kings they declared war upon the gods. A calendar was established from which the saints were banished. They created a new divinity, Reason, whose worship was celebrated in Notre-Dame, with ceremonies which were in many ways identical with those of the Catholic faith, upon the altar of the ``late Holy Virgin.'' This cult lasted until Robespierre substituted a personal religion of which he constituted himself the high priest.
The sole masters of France, the Jacobins and their disciples were able to plunder the country with impunity, although they were never in the majority anywhere.
Their numbers are not easy to determine exactly. We know only that they were very small. Taine valued them at 5,000 in Paris, among 700,000 inhabitants; in Besancon 300 among 300,000; and in all France about 300,000.
``A small feudality of brigands, set over a conquered France,'' according to the words of the same author, they were able, in spite of their small numbers, to dominate the country, and this for several reasons. In the first place, their faith gave them a considerable strength. Then, because they represented the Government, and for centuries the French had obeyed those who were in command. Finally, because it was believed that to overthrow them would be to bring back the ancien regime, which was greatly dreaded by the numerous purchasers of the national domains. Their tyranny must have grown frightful indeed to force so many departments to rise against them.
The first factor of their power was very important. In the conflict between powerful faiths and weak faiths victory never falls to the latter. A powerful faith creates strong wills, which will always overpower weak wills. That the Jacobins themselves did finally perish was because their accumulated violence had bound together thousands of weak wills whose united weight overbalanced their own strong wills.
It is true that the Girondists, whom the Jacobins persecuted with so much hatred, had also well-established beliefs, but in the struggle which ensued their education told against them, together with their respect for certain traditions and the rights of others, scruples which did not in the least trouble their adversaries.
``The majority of the sentiments of the Girondists,'' writes Emile Ollivier, ``were delicate and generous; those of the Jacobin mob were low, gross, and brutal. The name of Vergniaud, compared with that of the `divine' Marat, measures a gulf which nothing could span.''
Dominating the Convention at the outset by the superiority of their talents and their eloquence, the Girondists soon fell under the domination of the Montagnards—worthless energumens, who carried little weight, but were always active, and who knew how to excite the passions of the populace. It was violence and not talent that impressed the Assemblies.
3. Mental Characteristics of the Convention.
Beside the characteristics common to all assemblies there are some created by influences of environment and circumstances, which give any particular assembly of men a special physiognomy. Most of the characteristics observable in the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies reappeared, in an exaggerated form, in the Convention.
This Assembly comprised about seven hundred and fifty deputies, of whom rather more than a third had sat in the Constituent or the Legislative Assembly. By terrorising the population the Jacobins contrived to triumph at the elections. The majority of the electors, six millions out of seven, preferred to abstain from voting.
As to the professions, the Assembly contained a large number of lawyers, advocates, notaries, bailiffs, ex-magistrates, and a few literary men.
The mentality of the Convention was not homogeneous. Now, an assembly composed of individuals of widely different characters soon splits up into a number of groups. The Convention very early contained three—the Gironde, the Mountain, and the Plain. The constitutional monarchists had almost disappeared.
The Gironde and the Mountain, extreme parties, consisted of about a hundred members apiece, who successively became leaders. In the Mountain were the most advanced members: Couthon, Herault de Sechelles, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Marat, Collot d'Herbois, Billaud-Varennes, Barras, Saint-Just, Fouche, Tallien, Carrier, Robespierre, &c. In the Gironde were Brissot, Petion, Condorcet, Vergniaud, &c.
The five hundred other members of the Assembly—that is, the great majority—constituted what was known as the Plain.
This latter formed a floating mass, silent, undecided, and timid; ready to follow every impulse and to be carried away by the excitement of the moment. It gave ear indifferently to the stronger of the two preceding groups. After obeying the Gironde for some time it allowed itself to be led away by the Mountain, when the latter triumphed over its enemy. This was a natural consequence of the law already stated, by which the weak invariably fall under the dominion of the stronger wills.
The influence of great manipulators of men was displayed in a high degree during the Convention. It was constantly led by a violent minority of narrow minds, whose intense convictions lent them great strength.
A brutal and audacious minority will always lead a fearful and irresolute majority. This explains the constant tendency toward extremes to be observed in all revolutionary assemblies. The history of the Convention verifies once more the law of acceleration studied in another chapter.
The men of the Convention were thus bound to pass from moderation to greater and greater violence. Finally they decimated themselves. Of the 180 Girondists who at the outset led the Convention 140 were killed or fled, and finally the most fanatical of the Terrorists, Robespierre, reigned alone over a terrified crowd of servile representatives.
Yet it was among the five hundred members of the majority, uncertain and floating as it was, that the intelligence and experience were to be found. The technical committees to whom the useful work of the Convention was due were recruited from the Plain.
More or less indifferent to politics, the members of the Plain were chiefly anxious that no one should pay particular attention to them. Shut up in their committees, they showed themselves as little as possible in the Assembly, which explains why the sessions of the Convention contained barely a third of the deputies.
Unhappily, as often happens, these intelligent and honest men were completely devoid of character, and the fear which always dominated them made them vote for the worst of the measures introduced by their dreaded masters.
The men of the Plain voted for everything they were ordered to vote for—the creation of the Revolutionary Tribunal, the Terror, &c. It was with their assistance that the Mountain crushed the Gironde, and Robespierre destroyed the Hebertists and Dantonists. Like all weak people, they followed the strong. The gentle philanthropists who composed the Plain, and constituted the majority of the Assembly, contributed, by their pusillanimity, to bring about the frightful excesses of the Convention.
The psychological note always prevailing in the Convention was a horrible fear. It was more especially through fear that men cut off one another's heads, in the doubtful hope of keeping their own on their shoulders.
Such a fear was, of course, very comprehensible. The unhappy deputies deliberated amid the hootings and vociferations of the tribunes. At every moment veritable savages, armed with pikes, invaded the Assembly, and the majority of the members no longer dared to attend the sessions. When by chance they did go it was only to vote in silence according to the orders of the Mountain, which was only a third as numerous.
The fear which dominated the latter, although less visible, was just as profound. Men destroyed their enemies, not only because they were shallow fanatics, but because they were convinced that their own existence was threatened. The judges of the revolutionary Tribunals trembled no less. They would have willingly acquitted Danton, and the widow of Camille Desmoulins, and many others. They dared not.
But it was above all when Robespierre became the sole master that the phantom of fear oppressed the Assembly. It has truly been said that a glance from the master made his colleagues shrink with fear. On their faces one read ``the pallor of fear and the abandon of despair.''
All feared Robespierre and Robespierre feared all. It was because he feared conspiracies against him that he cut off men's heads, and it was also through fear that others allowed him to do so.
The memoirs of members of the Convention show plainly what a horrible memory they retained of this gloomy period. Questioned twenty years later, says Taine, on the true aim and the intimate thoughts of the Committee of Public Safety, Barrere replied:—
``We had only one feeling, that of self-preservation; only one desire, that of preserving our lives, which each of us believed to be threatened. You had your neighbour's head cut off so that your neighbour should not have you yourself guillotined.''
The history of the Convention constitutes one of the most striking examples that could be given of the influence of leaders and of fear upon an assembly.
CHAPTER IV
THE GOVERNMENT OF THE CONVENTION
1. The activity of the Clubs and the Commune during the Convention.
During the whole of its existence the Convention was governed by the leaders of the clubs and of the Commune.
We have already seen what was their influence on the preceding Assemblies. It became overwhelming during the Convention. The history of this latter is in reality that of the clubs and the Commune which dominated it. They enslaved, not only the Convention, but also all France. Numerous little provincial clubs, directed by that of the capital, supervised magistrates, denounced suspects, and undertook the execution of all the revolutionary orders.
When the clubs or the Commune had decided upon certain measures they had them voted by the Assembly then and there. If the Assembly resisted, they sent their armed delegations thither— that is, armed bands recruited from the scum of the populace. They conveyed injunctions which were always slavishly obeyed. The Commune was so sure of its strength that it even demanded of the Convention the immediate expulsion of deputies who displeased it.
While the Convention was composed generally of educated men, the members of the Commune and the clubs comprised a majority of small shopkeepers, labourers, and artisans, incapable of personal opinions, and always guided by their leaders—Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Robespierre, &c.
Of the two powers, clubs and insurrectionary Commune, the latter exercised the greater influence in Paris, because it had made for itself a revolutionary army. It held under its orders forty- eight committees of National Guards, who asked nothing more than to kill, sack, and, above all, plunder.
The tyranny with which the Commune crushed Paris was frightful. For example, it delegated to a certain cobbler, Chalandon by name, the right of surveillance over a portion of the capital—a right implying the power to send to the Revolutionary Tribunal, and therefore to the guillotine, all those whom he suspected. Certain streets were thus almost depopulated by him.
The Convention struggled feebly against the Commune at the outset, but did not prolong its resistance. The culminating point of the conflict occurred when the Convention wished to arrest Hebert, the friend of the Commune, and the latter sent armed bands who threatened the Assembly and demanded the expulsion of the Girondists who had provoked the measure. Upon the Convention refusing the Commune besieged it on June 2, 1798, by means of its revolutionary army, which was under the orders of Hanriot. Terrified, the Assembly gave up twenty-seven of its members. The Commune immediately sent a delegation ironically to felicitate it upon its obedience.
After the fall of the Girondists the Convention submitted itself completely to the injunctions of the omnipotent Commune. The latter decreed the levy of a revolutionary army, to be accompanied by a tribunal and a guillotine, which was to traverse the whole of France in order to execute suspects.
Only towards the end of its existence, after the fall of Robespierre, did the Convention contrive to escape from the yoke of the Jacobins and the Commune. It closed the Jacobin club and guillotined its leading members.
Despite such sanctions the leaders still continued to excite the populace and hurl it against the Convention. In Germinal and Prairial it underwent regular sieges. Armed delegations even succeeded in forcing the Convention to vote the re-establishment of the Commune and the convocation of a new Assembly, a measure which the Convention hastened to annul the moment the insurgents had withdrawn. Ashamed of its fear, it sent for regiments which disarmed the faubourgs and made nearly ten thousand arrests. Twenty-six leaders of the movement were put to death, and six deputies who were concerned in the riot were guillotined.
But the Convention did not resist to any purpose. When it was no longer led by the clubs and the Commune it obeyed the Committee of Public Safety and voted its decrees without discussion.
``The Convention,'' writes H. Williams, ``which spoke of nothing less than having all the princes and kings of Europe brought to its feet loaded with chains, was made prisoner in its own sanctuary by a handful of mercenaries.''
2. The Government of France during the Convention—The Terror.
As soon as it assembled in 1792 the Convention began by decreeing the abolition of royalty, and in spite of the hesitation of a great number of its members, who knew that the provinces were royalist, it proclaimed the Republic.
Intimately persuaded that such a proclamation would transform the civilised world, it instituted a new era and a new calendar. The year I. of this era marked the dawn of a world in which reason alone was to reign. It was inaugurated by the trial of Louis XVI., a measure which was ordered by the Commune, but which the majority of the Convention did not desire.
At its outset, in fact, the Convention was governed by its relatively moderate elements, the Girondists. The president and the secretaries had been chosen among the best known of this party. Robespierre, who was later to become the absolute master of the Convention, possessed so little influence at this time that he obtained only six votes for the presidency, while Petion received two hundred and thirty-five.
The Montagnards had at first only a very slight influence. Their power was of later growth. When they were in power there was no longer room in the Convention for moderate members.
Despite their minority the Montagnards found a way to force the Assembly to bring Louis to trial. This was at once a victory over the Girondists, the condemnation of all kings, and a final divorce between the old order and the new.
To bring about the trial they manoeuvred very skilfully, bombarding the Convention with petitions from the provinces, and sending a deputation from the insurrectional Commune of Paris, which demanded a trial.
According to a characteristic common to the Assemblies of the Revolution, that of yielding to threats and always doing the contrary of what they wished, the men of the Convention dared not resist. The trial was decided upon.
The Girondists, who individually would not have wished for the death of the king, voted for it out of fear once they were assembled. Hoping to save his own head, the Duc d'Orleans, Louis' cousin, voted with them. If, on mounting the scaffold on January 21, 1793, Louis had had that vision of the future which we attribute to the gods, he would have seen following him, one by one, the greater number of the Girondists whose weakness had been unable to defend him.
Regarded only from the purely utilitarian point of view, the execution of the king was one of the mistakes of the Revolution. It engendered civil war and armed Europe against France. In the Convention itself his death gave rise to intestine struggles, which finally led to the triumph of the Montagnards and the expulsion of the Girondists.
The measures passed under the influence of the Montagnards finally became so despotic that sixty departments, comprising the West and the South, revolted. The insurrection, which was headed by many of the expelled deputies, would perhaps have succeeded had not the compromising assistance of the royalists caused men to fear the return of the ancien regime. At Toulon, in fact, the insurgents acclaimed Louis XVII.
The civil war thus begun lasted during the greater part of the life of the Revolution. It was fought with the utmost savagery. Old men, women, children, all were massacred, and villages and crops were burned. In the Vendee alone the number of the killed was reckoned at something between half a million and a million.
Civil war was soon followed by foreign war. The Jacobins thought to remedy all these ills by creating a new Constitution. It was always a tradition with all the revolutionary assemblies to believe in the magic virtues of formula. In France this conviction has never been affected by the failure of experiments.
``A robust faith,'' writes one of the great admirers of the Revolution, M. Rambaud, ``sustained the Convention in this labour; it believed firmly that when it had formulated in a law the principles of the Revolution its enemies would be confounded, or, still better, converted, and that the advent of justice would disarm the insurgents.''
During its lifetime the Convention drafted two Constitutions— that of 1793, or the year I., and that of 1795, or the year III. The first was never applied, an absolute dictatorship very soon replacing it; the second created the Directory.
The Convention contained a large number of lawyers and men of affairs, who promptly comprehended the impossibility of government by means of a large Assembly. They soon divided the Convention into small committees, each of which had an independent existence—business committees, committees of legislation, finance, agriculture, arts, &c. These committees prepared the laws which the Assembly usually voted with its eyes closed.
Thanks to them, the work of the Convention was not purely destructive. They drafted many very useful measures, creating important colleges, establishing the metric system, &c. The majority of the members of the Assembly, as we have already seen, took refuge in these committees in order to evade the political conflict which would have endangered their heads.
Above the business committees, which had nothing to do with politics, was the Committee of Public Safety, instituted in April, 1793, and composed of nine members. Directed at first by Danton, and in the July of the same year by Robespierre, it gradually absorbed all the powers of government, including that of giving orders to ministers and generals. Carnot directed the operations of the war, Cambon the finances, and Saint-Just and Collot-d'Herbois the general policy.
Although the laws voted by the technical committees were often very wise, and constituted the lasting work of the Convention, those which the Assembly voted in a body under the threats of the delegations which invaded it were manifestly ridiculous.
Among these laws, which were not greatly in the interests of the public or of the Convention itself, were the law of the maximum, voted in September, 1793, which pretended to fix the price of provisions, and which merely established a continual dearth; the destruction of the royal tombs at Saint-Denis; the trial of the queen, the systematic devastation of the Vendee by fire, the establishment of the Revolutionary Tribunal, &c.
The Terror was the chief means of government during the Convention. Commencing in September, 1793, it reigned for six months—that is, until the death of Robespierre. Vainly did certain Jacobins— Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Herault de Sechelles, &c.—propose that clemency should be given a trial. The only result of this proposition was that its authors were sent to the scaffold. It was merely the lassitude of the public that finally put an end to this shameful period.
The successive struggles of the various parties in the Convention and its tendency towards extremes eliminated one by one the men of importance who had once played their part therein. Finally it fell under the exclusive domination of Robespierre. While the Convention was disorganising and ravaging France, the armies were winning brilliant victories. They had seized the left bank of the Rhine, Belgium, and Holland. The treaty of Basle ratified these conquests.
We have already mentioned, and we shall return to the matter again, that the work of the armies must be considered absolutely apart from that of the Convention. Contemporaries understood this perfectly, but to-day it is often forgotten.
When the Convention was dissolved, in 1795, after lasting for three years, it was regarded with universal distrust. The perpetual plaything of popular caprice, it had not succeeded in pacifying France, but had plunged her into anarchy. The general opinion respecting the Convention is well summed up in a letter written in July, 1799, by the Swedish charge d'affaires, Baron Drinkmann: ``I venture to hope that no people will ever be governed by the will of more cruel and imbecile scoundrels than those that have ruled France since the beginning of her new liberty.''
3. The End of the Convention. The Beginnings of the Directory.
At the end of its existence, the Convention, always trusting to the power of formulae, drafted a new Constitution, that of the year III., intended to replace that of 1793, which had never been put into execution. The legislative power was to be shared by a so-called Council of Ancients composed of 150 members, and a council of deputies numbering 500. The executive power was confided to a Directory of five members, who were appointed by the Ancients upon nomination by the Five Hundred, and renewed every year by the election of one of their number. It was specified that two-thirds of the members of the new Assembly should be chosen from among the deputies of the Convention. This prudent measure was not very efficacious, as only ten departments remained faithful to the Jacobins.
To avoid the election of royalists, the Convention had decided to banish all emigres in perpetuity.
The announcement of this Constitution did not produce the anticipated effect upon the public. It had no effect upon the popular riots, which continued. One of the most important was that which threatened the Convention on the 5th of October, 1795.
The leaders hurled a veritable army upon the Assembly. Before such provocation, the Convention finally decided to defend itself, and sent for troops, entrusting the command to Barras.
Bonaparte, who was then beginning to emerge from obscurity, was entrusted with the task of repression. With such a leader action was swift and energetic. Vigorously pounded with ball near the church at St. Roch, the insurgents fled, leaving some hundreds of dead on the spot.
This action, which displayed a firmness to which the Convention was little habituated, was only due to the celerity of the military operations, for while these were being carried out the insurgents had sent delegates to the Assembly, which, as usual, showed itself quite ready to yield to them.
The repression of this riot constituted the last important act of the Convention. On the 26th of October, 1795, it declared its mission terminated, and gave way to the Directory.
We have already laid stress upon some of the psychological lessons furnished by the government of the Convention. One of the most striking of these is the impotence of violence to dominate men's minds in permanence.
Never did any Government possess such formidable means of action, yet in spite of the permanent guillotine, despite the delegates sent with the guillotine into the provinces, despite its Draconian laws, the Convention had to struggle perpetually against riots, insurrections, and conspiracies. The cities, the departments, and the faubourgs of Paris were continually rising in revolt, although heads were falling by the thousand.
This Assembly, which thought itself sovereign, fought against the invincible forces which were fixed in men's minds, and which material constraint was powerless to overcome. Of these hidden motive forces it never understood the power, and it struggled against them in vain. In the end the invisible forces triumphed.
CHAPTER V
INSTANCES OF REVOLUTIONARY VIOLENCE
1. Psychological Causes of Revolutionary Violence.
We have shown in the course of the preceding chapters that the revolutionary theories constituted a new faith.
Humanitarian and sentimental, they exalted liberty and fraternity. But, as in many religions, we can observe a complete contradiction between doctrine and action. In practice no liberty was tolerated, and fraternity was quickly replaced by frenzied massacres.
This opposition between principles and conduct results from the intolerance which accompanies all beliefs. A religion may be steeped in humanitarianism and forbearance, but its sectaries will always want to impose it on others by force, so that violence is the inevitable result.
The cruelties of the Revolution were thus the inherent results of the propagation of the new dogmas. The Inquisition, the religious wars of France, St. Bartholomew's Day, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the ``Dragonnades,'' the persecution of the Jansenists, &c., belonged to the same family as the Terror and derived from the same psychological sources.
Louis XIV. was not a cruel king, yet under the impulse of his faith he drove hundreds of thousands of Protestants out of France, after first shooting down a considerable number and sending others to the galleys.
The methods of persuasion adopted by all believers are by no means a consequence of their fear of the dissentient opposition. Protestants and Jansenists were anything but dangerous under Louis XIV. Intolerance arises above all from the indignation experienced by a mind which is convinced that it possesses the most dazzling verities against the men who deny those truths, and who are surely not acting in good faith. How can one support error when one has the necessary strength to wipe it out?
Thus have reasoned the believers of all ages. Thus reasoned Louis XIV. and the men of the Terror. These latter also were convinced that they were in possession of absolute truths, which they believed to be obvious, and whose triumph was certain to regenerate humanity. Could they be more tolerant toward their adversaries than the Church and the kings of France had been toward heretics?
We are forced to believe that terror is a method which all believers regard as a necessity, since from the beginning of the ages religious codes have always been based upon terror. To force men to observe their prescriptions, believers have sought to terrify them with threats of an eternal hell of torments.
The apostles of the Jacobin belief behaved as their fathers had done, and employed the same methods. If similar events occurred again we should see identical actions repeated. If a new belief—Socialism, for example—were to triumph to-morrow, it would be led to employ methods of propaganda like those of the Inquisition and the Terror.
But were we to regard the Jacobin Terror solely as the result of a religious movement, we should not completely apprehend it. Around a triumphant religious belief, as we saw in the case of the Reformation, gather a host of individual interests which are dependent on that belief. The Terror was directed by a few fanatical apostles, but beside this small number of ardent proselytes, whose narrow minds dreamed of regenerating the world, were great numbers of men who lived only to enrich themselves. They rallied readily around the first victorious leader who promised to enable them to enjoy the results of their pillage.
``The Terrorists of the Revolution,'' writes Albert Sorel, ``resorted to the Terror because they wished to remain in power, and were incapable of doing so by other means. They employed it for their own salvation, and after the event they stated that their motive was the salvation of the State. Before it became a system it was a means of government, and the system was only invented to justify the means.''
We may thus fully agree with the following verdict on the Terror, written by Emile Ollivier in his work on the Revolution: ``The Terror was above all a Jacquerie, a regularised pillage, the vastest enterprise of theft that any association of criminals has ever organised.''
2. The Revolutionary Tribunals.
The Revolutionary Tribunals constituted the principal means of action of the Terror. Besides that of Paris, created at the instigation of Danton, and which a year afterwards sent its founder to the guillotine, France was covered with such tribunals.
``One hundred and seventy-eight tribunals,'' says Taine, ``of which 40 were perambulant, pronounced death sentences in all parts of the country, which were carried out instantly on the spot. Between the 16th of April, 1793, and the 9th of Thermidor in the year II. that of Paris guillotined 2,625 persons, and the provincial judges worked as hard as those of Paris. In the little town of Orange alone 331 persons were guillotined. In the city of Arras 299 men and 93 women were guillotined. . . . In the city of Lyons alone the revolutionary commissioner admitted to 1,684 executions. . . . The total number of these murders has been put at 17,000, among whom were 1,200 women, of whom a number were octogenarians.''
Although the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris claimed only 2,625 victims, it must not be forgotten that all the suspects had already been summarily massacred during the ``days'' of September.
The Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris, a mere instrument of the Committee of Public Safety, limited itself in reality, as Fouquier-Tinville justly remarked during his trial, to executing its orders. It surrounded itself at first with a few legal forms which did not long survive. Interrogatory, defence, witnesses— all were finally suppressed. Moral proof—that is, mere suspicion—sufficed to procure condemnation. The president usually contented himself with putting a vague question to the accused. To work more rapidly still, Fouquier-Tinville proposed to have the guillotine installed on the same premises as the Tribunal.
This Tribunal sent indiscriminately to the scaffold all the accused persons arrested by reason of party hatred, and very soon, in the hands of Robespierre, it constituted an instrument of the bloodiest tyranny. When Danton, one of its founders, became its victim, he justly asked pardon of God and men, before mounting the scaffold for having assisted to create such a Tribunal.
Nothing found mercy before it: neither the genius of Lavoisier, nor the gentleness of Lucile Desmoulins, nor the merit of Malesherbes. ``So much talent,'' said Benjamin Constant, ``massacred by the most cowardly and brutish of men!''
To find any excuse for the Revolutionary Tribunal, we must return to our conception of the religious mentality of the Jacobins, who founded and directed it. It was a piece of work comparable in its spirit and its aim to the Inquisition. The men who furnished its victims—Robespierre, Saint-Just, and Couthon—believed themselves the benefactors of the human race in suppressing all infidels, the enemies of the faith that was to regenerate the earth.
The executions during the Terror did not affect the members of the aristocracy only, since 4,000 peasants and 3,000 working-men were guillotined.
Given the emotion produced in Paris in our days by a capital execution, one might suppose that the execution of so many persons at one time would produce a very great emotion. But habit had so dulled sensibility that people paid but little attention to the matter at last. Mothers would take their children to see people guillotined as to-day they take them to the marionette theatre.
The daily spectacle of executions made the men of the time very indifferent to death. All mounted the scaffold with perfect tranquillity, the Girondists singing the Marseillaise as they climbed the steps.
This resignation resulted from the law of habitude, which very rapidly dulls emotion. To judge by the fact that royalist risings were taking place daily, the prospect of the guillotine no longer terrified men. Things happened as though the Terror terrorised no one. Terror is an efficacious psychological process so long as it does not last. The real terror resides far more in threats than in their realisation.
3. The Terror in the Provinces.
The executions of the Revolutionary Tribunals in the provinces represented only a portion of the massacres effected in the departments during the Terror. The revolutionary army, composed of vagabonds and brigands, marched through France killing and pillaging. Its method of procedure is well indicated by the following passage from Taine:—
``At Bedouin, a town of 2,000 inhabitants, where unknown hands had cut down the tree of liberty, 433 houses were demolished or fired, 16 persons were guillotined, and 47 shot down; all the other inhabitants were expelled and reduced to living as vagabonds in the mountains, and to taking shelter in caverns which they hollowed out of the earth.''
The fate of the wretches sent before the Revolutionary Tribunals was no better. The first mockery of trial was quickly suppressed. At Nantes, Carrier drowned and shot down according to his fancy nearly 5,000 persons—men, women, and children.
The details of these massacres figured in the Moniteur after the reaction of Thermidor. I cite a few lines:—
``I saw,'' says Thomas, ``after the taking of Noirmoutier, men and women and old people burned alive . . . women violated, girls of fourteen and fifteen, and massacred afterward, and tender babes thrown from bayonet to bayonet; children who were taken from beside their mothers stretched out on the ground.''
In the same number we read a deposition by one Julien, relating how Carrier forced his victims to dig their graves and to allow themselves to be buried alive. The issue of October 15, 1794, contained a report by Merlin de Thionville proving that the captain of the vessel le Destin had received orders to embark forty-one victims to be drowned—``among them a blind man of 78, twelve women, twelve girls, and fourteen children, of whom ten were from 10 to 6 and five at the breast.''
In the course of Carrier's trial (Moniteur, December 30, 1794) it was proved that he ``had given orders to drown and shoot women and children, and had ordered General Haxo to exterminate all the inhabitants of La Vendee and to burn down their dwellings.''
Carrier, like all wholesale murderers, took an intense joy in seeing his victims suffer. ``In the department in which I hunted the priests,'' he said, ``I have never laughed so much or experienced such pleasure as in watching their dying grimaces'' (Moniteur, December 22, 1794).
Carrier was tried to satisfy the reaction of Thermidor. But the massacres of Nantes were repeated in many other towns. Fouche slew more than 2,000 persons at Lyons, and so many were killed at Toulon that the population fell from 29,000 to 7,000 in a few months.
We must say in defence of Carrier, Freron, Fouche and all these sinister persons, that they were incessantly stimulated by the Committee of Public Safety. Carrier gave proof of this during his trial.
``I admit,'' said he (Moniteur, December 24, 1794), ``that 150 or 200 prisoners were shot every day, but it was by order of the commission. I informed the Convention that the brigands were being shot down by hundreds, and it applauded this letter, and ordered its insertion in the Bulletin. What were these deputies doing then who are so furious against me now? They were applauding. Why did they still keep me `on mission'? Because I was then the saviour of the country, and now I am a bloodthirsty man.''
Unhappily for him, Carrier did not know, as he remarked in the same speech, that only seven or eight persons led the Convention.
But the terrorised Assembly approved of all that these seven or eight ordered, so that they could say nothing in reply to Carrier's argument. He certainly deserved to be guillotined, but the whole Convention deserved to be guillotined with him, since it had approved of the massacres.
The defence of Carrier, justified by the letters of the Committee, by which the representatives ``on mission'' were incessantly stimulated, shows that the violence of the Terror resulted from a system, and not, as has sometimes been claimed, from the initiative of a few individuals.
The thirst for destruction during the Terror was by no means assuaged by the destruction of human beings only; there was an even greater destruction of inanimate things. The true believer is always an iconoclast. Once in power, he destroys with equal zeal the enemies of his faith and the images, temples, and symbols which recall the faith attacked.
We know that the first action of the Emperor Theodosius when converted to the Christian religion was to break down the majority of the temples which for six thousand years had been built beside the Nile. We must not, therefore, be surprised to see the leaders of the Revolution attacking the monuments and works of art which for them were the vestiges of an abhorred past.
Statues, manuscripts, stained glass windows, and plate were frenziedly broken. When Fouche, the future Duke of Otranto under Napoleon, and minister under Louis XVIII., was sent as commissary of the Convention to the Nievre, he ordered the demolition of all the towers of the chateaux and the belfries of the churches ``because they wounded equality.''
Revolutionary vandalism expended itself even on the tomb. Following a report read by Barrere to the Convention, the magnificent royal tombs at Saint-Denis, among which was the admirable mausoleum of Henri II., by Germain Pilon, were smashed to pieces, the coffins emptied, and the body of Turenne sent to the Museum as a curiosity, after one of the keepers had extracted the teeth in order to sell them as curiosities. The moustache and beard of Henri IV. were also torn out.
It is impossible to witness such comparatively enlightened men consenting to the destruction of the artistic patriotism of France without a feeling of sadness. To excuse them, we must remember that intense beliefs give rise to the worst excesses, and also that the Convention, almost daily invaded by rioters, always yielded to the popular will.
This glowing record of devastation proves, not only the power of fanaticism: it shows us what becomes of men who are liberated from all social restraints, and of the country which falls into their hands.
CHAPTER VI
THE ARMIES OF THE REVOLUTION
1. The Revolutionary Assemblies and the Armies.
If nothing were known of the revolutionary Assemblies, and notably of the Convention, beyond their internal dissensions, their weakness, and their acts of violence, their memory would indeed be a gloomy one.
But even for its enemies this bloodstained epoch must always
retain an undeniable glory, thanks to the success of its armies.
When the Convention dissolved France was already the greater by
Belgium and the territories on the left bank of the Rhine.
Regarding the Convention as a whole, it seems equitable to credit it with the victories of the armies of France, but if we analyse this whole in order to study each of its elements separately their independence will at once be obvious. It is at once apparent that the Convention had a very small share in the military events of the time. The armies on the frontier and the revolutionary Assemblies in Paris formed two separate worlds, which had very little influence over one another, and which regarded matters in a very different light.
We have seen that the Convention was a weak Government, which changed its ideas daily, according to popular impulse; it was really an example of the profoundest anarchy. It directed nothing, but was itself continually directed; how, then, could it have commanded armies?
Completely absorbed in its intestine quarrels, the Assembly had abandoned all military questions to a special committee, which was directed almost single-handed by Carnot, and whose real function was to furnish the troops with provisions and ammunition. The merit of Carnot consisted in the fact that besides directing over 752,000 men at the disposal of France, upon points which were strategically valuable, he also advised the generals of the armies to take the offensive, and to preserve a strict discipline.
The sole share of the Assembly in the defence of the country was the decree of the general levy. In the face of the numerous enemies then threatening France, no Government could have avoided such a measure. For some little time, too, the Assembly had sent representatives to the armies instructed to decapitate certain generals, but this policy was soon abandoned.
As a matter of fact the military activities of the Assembly were always extremely slight. The armies, thanks to their numbers, their enthusiasm, and the tactics devised by their youthful generals, achieved their victories unaided. They fought and conquered independently of the Convention.
2. The Struggle of Europe against the Revolution.
Before enumerating the various psychological factors which contributed to the successes of the revolutionary armies, it will be useful briefly to recall the origin and the development of the war against Europe.
At the commencement of the Revolution the foreign sovereigns regarded with satisfaction the difficulties of the French monarchy, which they had long regarded as a rival power. The King of Prussia, believing France to be greatly enfeebled, thought to enrich himself at her expense, so he proposed to the Emperor of Austria to help Louis on condition of receiving Flanders and Alsace as an indemnity. The two sovereigns signed an alliance against France in February, 1792. The French anticipated attack by declaring war upon Austria, under the influence of the Girondists. The French army was at the outset subjected to several checks. The allies penetrated into Champagne, and came within 130 miles of Paris. Dumouriez' victory at Valmy forced them to retire.
Although 300 French and 200 Prussians only were killed in this battle, it had very significant results. The fact that an army reputed invincible had been forced to retreat gave boldness to the young revolutionary troops, and everywhere they took the offensive. In a few weeks the soldiers of Valmy had chased the Austrians out of Belgium, where they were welcomed as liberators.
But it was under the Convention that the war assumed such
importance. At the beginning of 1793 the Assembly declared that
Belgium was united to France. From this resulted a conflict with
England which lasted for twenty-two years.
Assembled at Antwerp in April, 1793, the representatives of England, Prussia, and Austria resolved to dismember France. The Prussians were to seize Alsace and Lorraine; the Austrians, Flanders and Artois; the English, Dunkirk. The Austrian ambassador proposed to crush the Revolution by terror, ``by exterminating practically the whole of the party directing the nation.'' In the face of such declarations France had perforce to conquer or to perish.
During this first coalition, between 1793 and 1797, France had to fight on all her frontiers, from the Pyrenees to the north.
At the outset she lost her former conquests, and suffered several reverses. The Spaniards took Perpignan and Bayonne; the English, Toulon; and the Austrians, Valenciennes. It was then that the Convention, towards the end of 1793, ordered a general levy of all Frenchmen between the ages of eighteen and forty, and succeeded in sending to the frontiers a total of some 750,000 men. The old regiments of the royal army were combined with battalions of volunteers and conscripts.
The allies were repulsed, and Maubeuge was relieved after the victory of Wattigny, which was gained by Jourdan. Hoche rescued Lorraine. France took the offensive, reconquering Belgium and the left bank of the Rhine. Jourdan defeated the Austrians at Fleurus, drove them back upon the Rhine, and occupied Cologne and Coblentz. Holland was invaded. The allied sovereigns resigned themselves to suing for peace, and recognised the French conquests.
The successes of the French were favoured by the fact that the enemy never put their whole heart into the affair, as they were preoccupied by the partition of Poland, which they effected in 1793-5. Each Power wished to be on the spot in order to obtain more territory. This motive had already caused the King of Prussia to retire after the battle of Valmy in 1792.
The hesitations of the allies and their mutual distrust were extremely advantageous to the French. Had the Austrians marched upon Paris in the summer of 1793, ``we should,'' said General Thiebault, ``have lost a hundred times for one. They alone saved us, by giving us time to make soldiers, officers, and generals.''
After the treaty of Basle, France had no important adversaries on the Continent, save the Austrians. It was then that the Directory attacked Austria in Italy. Bonaparte was entrusted with the charge of this campaign. After a year of fighting, from April, 1796, to April, 1797, he forced the last enemies of France to demand peace.
3. Psychological and Military Factors which determined the Success of the Revolutionary Armies.
To realise the causes of the success of the revolutionary armies we must remember the prodigious enthusiasm, endurance, and abnegation of these ragged and often barefoot troops. Thoroughly steeped in revolutionary principles, they felt that they were the apostles of a new religion, which was destined to regenerate the world.
The history of the armies of the Revolution recalls that of the nomads of Arabia, who, excited to fanaticism by the ideals of Mohammed, were transformed into formidable armies which rapidly conquered a portion of the old Roman world. An analogous faith endowed the Republican soldiers with a heroism and intrepidity which never failed them, and which no reverse could shake When the Convention gave place to the Directory they had liberated the country, and had carried a war of invasion into the enemy's territory. At this period the soldiers were the only true Republicans left in France.
Faith is contagious, and the Revolution was regarded as a new era, so that several of the nations invaded, oppressed by the absolutism of their monarchs, welcomed the invaders as liberators. The inhabitants of Savoy ran out to meet the troops.
At Mayence the crowd welcomed them with enthusiasm planted trees of liberty, and formed a Convention in imitation of that of Paris.
So long as the armies of the Revolution had to deal with peoples bent under the yoke of absolute monarchy, and having no personal ideal to defend, their success was relatively easy. But when they entered into conflict with peoples who had an ideal as strong as their own victory became far more difficult.
The new ideal of liberty and equality was capable of seducing peoples who had no precise convictions, and were suffering from the despotism of their masters, but it was naturally powerless against those who possessed a potent ideal of their own which had been long established in their minds. For this reason Bretons and Vendeeans, whose religious and monarchical sentiments were extremely powerful, successfully struggled for years against the armies of the Republic.
In March, 1793, the insurrections of the Vendee and Brittany had spread to ten departments. The Vendeeans in Poitou and the Chouans in Brittany put 80,000 men in the field.
The conflicts between contrary ideals—that is, between beliefs in which reason can play no part—are always pitiless, and the struggle with the Vendee immediately assumed the ferocious savagery always observable in religious wars. It lasted until the end of 1795, when Hoche finally ``pacified'' the country. This pacification was the simple result of the practical extermination of its defenders.
``After two years of civil war,'' writes Molinari, ``the Vendee was no more than a hideous heap of ruins. About 900,000 individuals—men, women, children, and aged people—had perished, and the small number of those who had escaped massacre could scarcely find food or shelter. The fields were devastated, the hedges and walls destroyed, and the houses burned.''
Besides their faith, which so often rendered them invincible, the soldiers of the Revolution had usually the advantage of being led by remarkable generals, full of ardour and formed on the battle- field.
The majority of the former leaders of the army, being nobles, had emigrated so that a new body of officers had to be organised. The result was that those gifted with innate military aptitudes had a chance of showing them, and passed through all the grades of rank in a few months. Hoche, for instance, a corporal in 1789, was a general of division and commander of an army at the age of twenty-five. The extreme youth of these leaders resulted in a spirit of aggression to which the armies opposed to them were not accustomed. Selected only according to merit, and hampered by no traditions, no routine, they quickly succeeded in working out a tactics suited to the new necessities.
Of soldiers without experience opposed to seasoned professional troops, drilled and trained according to the methods in use everywhere since the Seven Years' War, one could not expect complicated manoeuvres.
Attacks were delivered simply by great masses of troops. Thanks to the numbers of the men at the disposal of their generals, the considerable gaps provoked by this efficacious but barbarous procedure could be rapidly filled.
Deep masses of men attacked the enemy with the bayonet, and quickly routed men accustomed to methods which were more careful of the lives of soldiers. The slow rate of fire in those days rendered the French tactics relatively easy of employment. It triumphed, but at the cost of enormous losses. It has been calculated that between 1792 and 1800 the French army left more than a third of its effective force on the battle-field (700,000 men out of 2,000,000).
Examining events from a psychological point of view, we shall continue to elicit the consequences from the facts on which they are consequent.
A study of the revolutionary crowds in Paris and in the armies presents very different but readily interpreted pictures.
We have proved that crowds, unable to reason, obey simply their impulses, which are always changing, but we have also seen that they are readily capable of heroism, that their altruism is often highly developed, and that it is easy to find thousands of men ready to give their lives for a belief.
Psychological characteristics so diverse must naturally, according to the circumstances, lead to dissimilar and even absolutely contradictory actions. The history of the Convention and its armies proves as much. It shows us crowds composed of similar elements acting so differently in Paris and on the frontiers that one can hardly believe the same people can be in question.
In Paris the crowds were disorderly, violent, murderous, and so changeable in their demands as to make all government impossible.
In the armies the picture was entirely different. The same multitudes of unaccustomed men, restrained by the orderly elements of a laborious peasant population, standardised by military discipline, and inspired by contagious enthusiasm, heroically supported privations, disdained perils, and contributed to form that fabulous strain which triumphed over the most redoubtable troops in Europe.
These facts are among those which should always be invoked to show the force of discipline. It transforms men. Liberated from its influence, peoples and armies become barbarian hordes.
This truth is daily and increasingly forgotten. Ignoring the fundamental laws of collective logic, we give way more and more to shifting popular impulses, instead of learning to direct them.
The multitude must be shown the road to follow; it is not for them to choose it.
CHAPTER VII
PSYCHOLOGY OF THE LEADERS OF THE REVOLUTION
1. Mentality of the Men of the Revolution. The respective Influence of Violent and Feeble Characters.
Men judge with their intelligence, and are guided by their characters. To understand a man fully one must separate these two elements.
During the great periods of activity—and the revolutionary movements naturally belong to such periods—character always takes the first rank.
Having in several chapters described the various mentalities which predominate in times of disturbance, we need not return to the subject now. They constitute general types which are naturally modified by each man's inherited and acquired personality.
We have seen what an important part was played by the mystic element in the Jacobin mentality, and the ferocious fanaticism to which it led the sectaries of the new faith.
We have also seen that all the members of the Assemblies were not fanatics. These latter were even in the minority, since in the most sanguinary of the revolutionary assemblies the great majority was composed of timid and moderate men of neutral character. Before Thermidor the members of this group voted from fear with the violent and after Thermidor with the moderate deputies.
In time of revolution, as at other times, these neutral characters, obeying the most contrary impulses, are always the most numerous. They are also as dangerous in reality as the violent characters. The force of the latter is supported by the weakness of the former.
In all revolutions, and in particularly in the French Revolution, we observe a small minority of narrow but decided minds which imperiously dominate an immense majority of men who are often very intelligent but are lacking in character
Besides the fanatical apostles and the feeble characters, a revolution always produces individuals who merely think how to profit thereby. These were numerous during the French Revolution. Their aim was simply to utilise circumstances so as to enrich themselves. Such were Barras, Tallien, Fouche, Barrere, and many more. Their politics consisted simply in serving the strong against the weak.
From the outset of the Revolution these ``arrivists,'' as one would call them to-day, were numerous. Camille Desmoulins wrote in 1792: ``Our Revolution has its roots only in the egotism and self-love of each individual, of the combination of which the general interest is composed.''
If we add to these indications the observations contained in another chapter concerning the various forms of mentality to be observed in times of political upheaval, we shall obtain a general idea of the character of the men of the Revolution. We shall now apply the principles already expounded to the most remarkable personages of the revolutionary period.
2. Psychology of the Commissaries or Representatives ``on Mission.''
In Paris the conduct of the members of the Convention was always directed, restrained, or excited by the action of their colleagues, and that of their environment.
To judge them properly we should observe them when left to themselves and uncontrolled, when they possessed full liberty. Such were the representatives who were sent ``on mission'' into the departments by the Convention.
The power of these delegates was absolute. No censure embarrassed them. Functionaries and magistrates had perforce to obey them.
A representative ``on mission'' ``requisitions,'' sequestrates, or confiscates as seems good to him; taxes, imprisons, deports, or decapitates as he thinks fit, and in his own district he is a ''pasha.''
Regarding themselves as ``pashas,'' they displayed themselves ``drawn in carriages with six horses, surrounded by guards; sitting at sumptuous tables with thirty covers, eating to the sound of music, with a following of players, courtezans, and mercenaries. . . .'' At Lyons ``the solemn appearance of Collot d'Herbois is like that of the Grand Turk. No one can come into his presence without three repeated requests; a string of apartments precedes his reception-room, and no one approaches nearer than fifteen paces.''
One can picture the immense vanity of these dictators as they solemnly entered the towns, surrounded by guards, men whose gesture was enough to cause heads to fall.
Petty lawyers without clients, doctors without patients, unfrocked clergymen, obscure attorneys, who had formerly known the most colourless of lives, were suddenly made the equals of the most powerful tyrants of history. Guillotining, drowning, shooting without mercy, at the hazard of their fancy, they were raised from their former humble condition to the level of the most celebrated potentates.
Never did Nero or Heliogabalus surpass in tyranny the representatives of the Convention. Laws and customs always restrained the former to a certain extent. Nothing restrained the commissaries.
``Fouche,'' writes Taine, ``lorgnette in hand, watched the butchery of 210 inhabitants of Lyons from his window. Collot, Laporte, and Fouche feasted on days of execution (fusillades), and at the sound of each discharge sprang up with cries of joy, waving their hats.''
Among the representatives ``on mission'' who exhibit this murderous mentality we may cite as a type the ex-cure Lebon, who, having become possessed of supreme power, ravaged Arras and Cambrai. His example, with that of Carrier, contributes to show what man can become when he escapes from the yoke of law and tradition. The cruelty of the ferocious commissary was complicated by Sadism; the scaffold was raised under his windows, so that he, his wife, and his helpers could rejoice in the carnage. At the foot of the guillotine a drinking-booth was established where the sans-culottes could come to drink. To amuse them the executioner would group on the pavement, in ridiculous attitudes, the naked bodies of the decapitated.
``The reading of the two volumes of his trial, printed at Amiens in 1795, may be counted as a nightmare. During twenty sessions the survivors of the hecatombs of Arras and Cambrai passed through the ancient hall of the bailiwick at Amiens, where the ex-member of the Convention was tried. What these phantoms in mourning related is unheard of. Entire streets dispeopled; nonagenarians and girls of sixteen decapitated after a mockery of a trial; death buffeted, insulted, adorned, rejoiced in; executions to music; battalions of children recruited to guard the scaffold; the debauchery, the cynicism, the refinements of an insane satrap; a romance by Sade turned epic; it seems, as we watch the unpacking of these horrors, that a whole country, long terrorised, is at last disgorging its terror and revenging itself for its cowardice by overwhelming the wretch there, the scapegoat of an abhorred and vanished system.''