I desire
in this additional chapter to show what place Danton filled in the Revolution
by describing the madness and the reaction that followed his loss; and the
extent to which his influence, in spite of these, was permanent.
When
Danton disappeared, one man remained the master of the terrible machine which
he had created. It remains to show what were the fortunes of his work when
death had come to complete the results of his abdication.
The
genius of the dead man had foreseen a necessity, had met it with an
institution, and that institution had proved his wisdom by its immense success.
France was one within, and was beginning on her frontiers the war whose success
was not to end until it had rebuilt all Europe. This unprecedented power
dominated a country long used to centralisation, and was strengthened by the
accidents of the time, by the even play of the government over a surface where
all local obstacles had broken down, by the tacit acquiescence of every patriotic
man (for it was the thing that saved the nation), by the very abuse of punitive
measures. This power was destined to change from a machine to a toy.
They say
the children of that time had little models of the guillotine to play with. The
statement is picturesque and presumably false, but it will serve well for a
simile. A man unused to action, dreaming of a perfect state which was but a
reflection of his own intensely concentrated mind, acquired the control of the
guillotine. Unfortunately the model was of fall size.
The
punishment of death had hitherto been inflicted, for the most part, with a
clear and definite, though often with an immoral, object. In the hands of
Robespierre it was used to defend a theory and a whim. The men of the time loved
their country ardently, and believed with the firmness of a large and generous
faith in those principles upon which all our civilisation is at present based.
France and the Republic were, in their minds, one thing, and a thing which they
spared no means to make survive the most terrible struggle into which any
nation has ever dared to enter. They killed that they might be obeyed in a time
which verged on anarchy, and they desired to be obeyed because, but for
obedience to government, France and all her liberties would have perished. Such
a motive for punishment is just, and its execution is honest.
By the
side of this and beyond it were the excesses, those excesses in protest against
which Danton himself had died. Execrable as were these, infamous as will ever
remain their most conspicuous actors, Hubert and Carrier, they were prompted by
a motive which is of the commonest and the most easily understood in human
affairs. They were actions of revenge. Danton had said once and sincerely, “I
can find no use for hate.” It was the key to his successful effort, by far the
most creative in a time when all was energy, that no part of his strength was
lost in personal attack, hardly any in personal defence. This could no more be
said of his contemporaries than it can be said of the bulk of men in any
nation, even in times of order and of peace. And everywhere, in Nantes, in
Lyons, in the Vendée, in the accusation of Marie Antoinette, from the very
beginning of the Terror, this hate had surged and broken. The Girondins were
put to death on a charge full of the spirit of revenge; and as the autumn grew
into winter, in the very crisis of that oppression by which the nation had been
saved, the accusations became trivial, the process of justice more and more of
a personal act, depending in the provinces on the temper of an emissary, in
Paris upon the summary judgment of the Committee and the Tribunal.
But all
this had so far been comprehensible. With the advent of Robespierre to full
power we have to deal with a phase of history which will hardly be understood
in happier times. Danton, who saw straight, who understood, and who, when the
victories began, found leisure to pity, is a type whose extremes are the
romance, whose moderation is the groundwork of history. We have to deal in him
with an enthusiast who is also a statesman, in whom the mind has sufficient
power to know itself even in its violence, and to return deliberately within
its usual boundaries after never so fantastic an excursion. With Hubert again
we know the type. Those are not rare in whom passions purely personal dominate
all abstract conceptions, and whose natures desire the horrible in literature
during times of peace, and satisfy their desire by action during their moments
of power.
But with
Robespierre an absolutely different feature is presented: the man who could
laugh and the man who could hate, the right and the left wing have disappeared,
and there is left standing alone a personality which had gradually become the
idol of the city. He could neither laugh nor hate; the love of country itself,
which illuminates so much in the Revolution, and which explains so many follies
in the smaller men, even that was practically absent in the mind of
Robespierre. His character would have fitted well with the absence of the human
senses, and should some further document discover to historians that he lacked
the sense of taste, that he was colour-blind, or that he could not distinguish
the notes of music, these details would do much to complete the imperfect and
troubling picture. For in the sphere that is above, but co-ordinate with,
physical life, all those avenues by which our fellow-beings touch us more
nearly than ideas were closed to him.
It is
possible that he may take, centuries hence, the appearance of majesty. He had
the reserve, the dignity, the intense idealism, the perfect belief in himself,
the certitude that others were in sympathy—all the characteristics, in fine,
which distinguish the Absolutists and the great Reformers. In his iron code of
theory we seem to hear the ghost of a Calvin, in his reiterated morals and his
perpetual application of them there is the occasional sharp reminiscence of a
Hildebrand. The famous death cry, “I have loved justice and hated iniquity,
therefore I die in exile,” is not so far distant from “ . . . de mourir pour
le peuple et d’en être abhorré.”
We are
accustomed to clothe such figures with a solemn drapery, and to lend them, at
great distances of time, a certain terrible grandeur. Robespierre is too near us,
he is too well known, and his reforms failed too utterly, for this to be now
the case with him. Yet it may well happen that some one else treading in the
same path, and succeeding, will see fit to build a legend round his name.
What
then was the ideal which he pursued—this “one idea,” which stood so perpetually
before him as to exclude the sight of all human things, of sufferings, of
memories, of patriotism itself? It was the civic ideal of Rousseau, in so far
as he conformed to it, and nothing more.
The
ideas of the great reformers must of their nature be simple—unworkably simple.
But Robespierre’s idea was less than simple it was thin. Now and again in the
history of upheavals a type has been defined with special formulae, which in
its original shape could never have survived the conditions of active
existence, but which was real enough to receive accretions, and robust enough
to bear moulding until at length it became the living nucleus of a new society,
changed, transformed in a thousand details, yet in its main lines the ideal of
the founder. With all the great reforms of the world some such type has been
present; the Puritan, the knight of chivalry, were at first but a faint figure
realised in a few phrases.
Rousseau
himself had created such a type, and it has survived; for what permanent
fortunes a century is insufficient to show. The Republican citizen of
Jean-Jacques stood in the generation which succeeded him the centre of a new
society; in a thousand shapes he really lived. Thomas Jefferson, William
Cobbett, were living men to whom this ideal stood for model; not in its
details, but in its main lines. Such noble men are to be met to-day on every
side.
But
Robespierre saw reflected in his mind a figure at once more detailed and less
human, and one too sharply defined to be capable of any moulding or of any
transference into the real world. For him this ideal citizen was nevertheless
the one good thing, the one sound basis of a State. This ideal citizen existed
(did men only know it) in each individual; all men could be made to approach
the type; only a very few were opposed to its success, and it was a sacred duty
to break their criminal effort. The figure stood ever before him, it dominated
his every thought, it was the sacred thing before which his essentially
mystical mind was perpetually at worship. But he could see nothing beyond or on
either side of it; concrete impressions faded on the unhealthy retina of his
mind. For there was a mirror held up before his eyes, and the figure on which he
dwelt was himself.
Thus
intensely concentrated upon a certain individual type, it was in his nature to
forget the reactions of a community. He saw in society a few evils prominent,
authority without warrant, arbitrary rule (that hateful thing), servility in
the oppressed (the main impediment to any reform). He was blind to the
interplay, the organic quality in a State, which our own time so ridiculously
exaggerates, but which the eighteenth century as a whole neglected. Rousseau
had put admirably the metaphor of contract as explaining the bond of society.
Robespierre, interpreting him, conceived of contract as the simple and
all-sufficient machinery of a State. The error gave his attempt a mechanical
and an inhuman appearance over and above its rigidity of dogma. Rousseau, like
all the great writers, gave continual glimpses of the insufficiency of
language; he let his audience see in a hundred phrases, in a recurrence of
qualifications, that his words were no more than the words of others, hints at
realities, at the best metaphors brought as near as possible to be the true
reflection of ideas. Robespierre read him, and has remained among the words
entangled and satisfied. Rousseau was perpetually insisting upon a point of
view, calling out, “Come and see.” He had discovered a position from which (as
he thought) the bewildering complexity of human affairs appeared in a just and
simple perspective, But Rousseau never asserts that such a view will have the
same colouring to all men; on the contrary, at his best he denies it. He trusts
to the main aspect of his theory for a main result in the State, to an
agreement among men of good-will for the harmonising of conflicting details.
Robespierre, as the high-priest of that gospel, had come and had seen, but the perfect
citizen and the perfect state of his vision must be realised in every tittle as
he had observed them. Once again a great message was destined to be sterilised
and almost lost through the functionary of its creed.
Such was
the man who had slowly supplanted Danton. A mind whose type of aberration is
common to all nations had supplanted the typical Frenchman who had organised
the defence of France, and in the place of one whom his enemies perpetually
reproach with an excess of vigour and manhood, a theorist of hardly any but
intellectual emotions was master.
What
gave him his great ascendancy, his practically absolute power? It was due, in
the first place, to the popularity whose growth was the feature of the later
Revolution. That popularity was real in the number of his followers and in the
sincerity of their profession. It must be remembered that hitherto he had stood
on the side of leniency in public action, while in words he had expressed
always accurately, sometimes nobly, the ideals upon which the nation was bent.
He had, from a constitutional incapacity for real work, been only in the
background of those crises which had left behind them an increasing crowd of
malcontents. Not he, but Danton, had made the 10th of August. No one had
connected his name with the massacres of September. The necessity of
government was not his interpretation of the defeats in Belgium; the
creation of that government was another’s; its latent benefits reflect no merit
upon him now, its immediate rigours exposed him to no special vengeance at the
time. Not he, but Marat, is the obvious demagogue whom the visionary Girondin
girl marks out as the enemy. To Carnot would turn the hatred of those whom the
great conscription oppressed. The Christian foundation of France had others
than Robespierre to curse for the Masque of Reason and for the suppression of
public worship. He had stood behind Desmoulins when the reaction of Nivose and
Frimaire was at work; he had approved and was thought the author of that trial
and execution in which Hébert had suffered the sentence already pronounced upon
him by the best of France. In fact, he had stood in nothing as the extremist or
as the tyrant till the day when he permitted the arrest of Danton. He had been
rather the voice of a strong public opinion than the arm which, when it acts at
the orders of unreason, becomes hated by its own furious master. Thus upon the
negative side there was nothing to prevent his sudden attainment of power.
In the
second place, his name had been the most present and the most familiar from the
earliest days of the Revolution. He had sat in the Assembly of the Commons five
years before, a notable though hardly a noted figure, with some stories
surrounding him, with quite a reputation in his provincial centre; he had been,
since first the Jacobin Club became the mouthpiece of the pure Republicans, the
conspicuous leader of the Society. The force of continuity and tradition counts
for little in the history of this whirlwind, but such as it is it explains to a
great degree the ascendancy of Robespierre. He alone was never absent, he alone
remained to chant a ceaseless chorus to the action of the drama. His name was
familiar to excess; but it was hardly an epoch at which men grew weary of
hearing a politician called “the just.” Besides this familiarity with his name,
certain virtues—and those the most cherished of the time—were in fact or by
reputation his. None could accuse him of venality; his sincerity was
obvious—indeed, it was the necessary fruit of his narrow mind. The ambition
from which we cannot divorce his name was apparent to but few of his
contemporaries, and was not fully seized even by his enemies till he had
started on that short career of absolute power which has stamped itself for
ever upon the fortunes of his country. Thus habit, the strongest of forces, was
his ally.
In the
third place, circumstances quite as much as his own action had left him (as far
as one can follow the mysteries of the Committee) sole director of an
exceptional executive. On account of the illusions and necessities of the
people such a position was not immediately recognised as tyrannical. The
machine was theirs, working for them and made by them; all the better if an
idol of theirs held the levers; he would make the most trusty of servants.
Robespierre was not master in theory. Even committees were not the masters in
theory. Theory was everything to France in the year II, and in theory the
Convention was master. Nay, even the Convention was only master because—in
theory again—the sovereign, the nation, was behind it. The majority of the
Convention, and it alone, is the technical authority. Robespierre’s name was
not to be discovered at the foot of those lists of the condemned which his
monstrous policy constructed, and at the end of his four months he fell because
the theoretical master, the Convention, acted as it chose, and no sufficient
force dared to deny its right.
He
starts then upon the closing act of the play, the one figure whom all regard,
and into whose hands the police, the committees, the juries, and (by their own
disorder) the majority of the Convention itself have fallen.
The new
reign began on the 6th of April, exactly a year to a day since the Committee of
Public Safety had been established. It was Germinal, the month of seeds that
grow under ground, the most significant and the most terrible of the new names.
M. Zola has chosen it for the title of his greatest work; it was the other day
on the dying lips of a poor wretch in Spain whose madness also turned upon social
injustice.
The
following of Robespierre did not hesitate to show at once its tendencies and
even its dogmas—for it held a religion. That same day, the 6th of April—17th
Germinal of the year II. Couthon came from the Committee with a proposition for
the Parliament to discuss the establishment of a national worship of God. A new
note had been heard in the clamour; soon in the clear silence of suspense it is
to be the only sound, saving the dull accompaniment of the two guillotines.
This or that occasional freak of theory or dramatised ribaldry the Terror had
already known; unlimited power defended by inexorable severity had developed
many strange decrees, dissociated from the general life and dying as they
rose—absurdities whose chief purpose would seem to be the interest they have
afforded to foreigners. But in these there had been no system. The Mass was
being said on all sides when the churches were supposed to be closed. Even as
the Feast of Reason was being held at Notre Dame, vespers were chanted at St.
Germains. One thing alone had been the purpose and had given the motive force
to nine months of agony endured the salvation of Revolutionary France. But when
Couthon spoke it was not France, nor common rights and liberties which were
proposed as the object of the defence—it was Robespierrian Rousseau. In two
months we shall have the worship of the Supreme Being, in three the reaction;
in less than four the high-priest of this impossible system is to fall; yet his
dream and his power will be almost enough in their fall to drag down the
Republic.
Five
days more saw “the rest of the factions” sacrificed to this new personal
terror. Gobel, who had always been afraid, and whose conscience had been turned
like a weathercock away from the nearest pike; the wives of Desmoulins and of
Hébert (for women, as the Terror increased, were suspected, sometimes rightly,
of being the best at plotting); Chaumette, who had helped Hébert to put up his
theatricals in Notre Dame—they were all tried, and in this trial it is again
not the Revolution, but Robespierre pure and simple whom we hear arguing and
condemning through the mouths of the court.
One of
the accused “has wished to efface the idea of the divinity.” Another has
“interfered with the worship of his fellow-citizens” (this was said to
Chaumette, who must have thought it even at that moment something of a
platitude). To a third the reproach is made of “changing the mode of worship
without authority.” We are on the highroad to those last six weeks in which
trial of any kind and definite accusation itself was absent. The details of one
man’s opinion are become the numberless dogmas of a creed, and of a creed that
kills unmercifully. And yet even as he asserted his creed its mechanical
impotence appeared in violent contrast with the humanity that the Puritan was
persecuting. For Lucille lighted her face radiantly when she was condemned, and
said, “I shall see him in a few hours.”
Three
days more—the 17th of April—and the machinery was further centralised. St. Just
demanded that the political prisoners should be taken from every part of France
to be judged in Paris. The popular commissions—mere gatherings to denounce
without proofs and without forms were actively used all over the Republic. In
Paris the commission was to be the feeler for the central machine. And such was
the incapacity of the Dreamer, “who had not wits enough to cook an egg,” that
this new feature in the machinery was not even organised: it was a government
of mere rigid absolutism resting on bases that were rapidly becoming mere
anarchy. But even as the system, such as it was, developed, as the central
power grew more rigid, and the thing to be governed more decayed, Danton, who
had been killed that it might exist, pursued it. It was due to his work that
the wrestling on the frontier was showing a definite issue. The advance had
begun.
With his
death the diplomacy of France had ceased. The phrase of Robespierre’s, which he
had so successfully combated, had reappeared in vigour: the “nation would not treat
with her enemies.” But the organisation of her armies, the levies, the rigid
discipline, the arms were telling. That aspect of the national energy had grown
more healthy as the central brain grew more diseased and vain. Robespierre was
threatening Carnot vaguely in the Committee, but Carnot was at work and was
saving France. St. Just himself, when he is upon the frontier, appears in a
capacity worthy of admiration, for he has there to deal with a thing in action.
His energy is as fierce as ever, but its object is victory over a national
enemy, and not the triumph of a jejune idea. He had better have remained with
the soldiers.
In Paris
the Commune had been seized. The enemy whom all had feared, whom even Danton
had to the last conciliated, was fearlessly grasped. The mayor was broken
simply, and replaced by a servant of the rulers; the Sections protested with
the last of their vitality, but the Club denounced them, and they
disappeared—even an attempt at martyrdom is to give the idol yet more gilt Then
the news of Turcoing came to Paris. It was little more than a happy rumour, a
battle whose importance seems greater to us now than it did to contemporaries.
But Pichegru, the peasant, had prepared a good road for Jourdan, and Fleurus
was the direct result of Turcoing. Barrfere long after called these victories
“the Furies,” which swept upon and destroyed the fanatic in power.
With
every point of good news the Terror was less necessary, yet Robespierre’s
action grew as the national danger disappeared. Even Lord Howe’s great victory
of the 1st of June did little to check the sentiment of relief. The Vengeur went
down and left a force of many ships to the French navy for ever. The food
reached port, and the eyes of Frenchmen were not directed to the sea, whose
command they knew themselves to have gained and lost before then with but
little resulting change; they turned, as they have always and will ever turn,
to the frontier of the north-east, the wrestling-ring upon whose fair level was
to be decided the fate of all their sacrifice and of all their ideals, and
Paris every day grew more hopeful of the result, Robespierre more blind to
everything except his vision. On the 8th of June—the 20th Prairial—he capped
the edifice of his national religion with the Feast of the Supreme Being , on
the 10th he forged the last piece of the machinery which was to make that
religion the moral order of the new era by force.
In the
connection of these dates we see the whole man and the time. Three weeks pass
from the first definite victory against the allies to the law of the 22nd
Prairial. That short time widened the breach between the armies and the
government till it became an impassable gulf. The fruit of that schism was to
appear much later, but already its elements were clear. Of the two parts of
Canton’s work one had become national, healthy, representative; the other,
which had been designed for similar action, had finally become a thing of
personalities and of theories. The armies were in full success, the Terror was menaced,
and was doomed.
In this
feast of the Almighty, Robespierre was insanely himself. He wore his
bright-blue coat, perhaps to typify the bright sky which we have all worshipped
for so many thousand years. In his little white hand, that never had been nor
could be put to a man’s work, he held the typical offerings of fruit and corn.
His head was bent forward a little, and he looked at the ground. The men who
stood up boldly in the attitudes of Mirabeau and of the Tribunes were dead or
in the armies.
Remove
the scene by hundreds of years, and tell it of a primitive people in some
mountain valley, it assumes a simplicity and a grandeur as legend. Their old
traditions (let us say) have been lost or stolen from them. They are casting
about for a lawgiver and for a starting-point. A pure idealist is found,
draconian in his method, but ascetic and sincere in his life, laying down as
necessary for the state a clear and simple morality, basing all ethics on the
recognition and the worship of God. If we make that picture we have some idea
of what passed through the mind of the little clique which still surrounded
Robespierre, some conception of the picture which still half-fascinated the
crowd. For Robespierre himself it was intensely true; he lived æons and myriads
of leagues away in time and space from humanity, intent upon his dream.
But in
sight of the mummery stood Notre Dame. Not a man there but had been baptized in
the Christian faith; a history more complex and more eventful than that of
perhaps any other nation was the inheritance and the future of that crowd. And
even as the game was being played, the real France on the Sambre and in the
plains of Valenciennes was carrying out the oldest of struggles in defence of
the first of rights. The scene has been laughed at and despised sufficiently by
aliens within and without the French nation; let it suffice for this book to
insist upon its unreality, and to assert that its principal actor was genuine
because he lived in the unreal.
The law
of the 22nd of Prairial followed this feast. It was the establishment of a pure
despotism, arbitrary, absolute, personal. Already the trials were centralised
in Paris since the demand of St. Just had been made. The Commune had been
captured, the popular commissions used, even the Presidency of the Convention
had become the appanage of one man and his associates. This new law proposed
the final step. After it was passed the trials were to be conducted without
proofs, and without witness or pleading, for they were to be nothing more than
a formal process. The Committee once satisfied of guilt, the tribunal was
merely to condemn. To be upon the lists was virtually to be dead. It was the
end of civil government, the declaration of a state of siege. And that at the
moment when the armies sent every day better and better news. The Convention
debated with Robespierre in the chair; it hesitated and it nearly condemned the
proposal. There was a conflict in the minds of some between the
admiration—almost the adoration—of a man; in the minds of others, between fear
and the necessity apparent to all of relaxing the machinery which only the
national danger had called into being.
Robespierre
came down from the chair and spoke. The even, certain voice which carried away
his admirers, which terrified his opponents, succeeded, and the law was passed.
Those who find it easy to judge the time, who think it may all be explained by
the baseness or the pusillanimity of the Parliament, should note the appeal
which he made to the Moderates even then—an appeal which had always been
successful, which, when his death drew near, he made at last (and for the first
time) in vain.
For the
Moderates, the Plain, the “Marsh,” saw in him a kind of saviour, the just man,
the slayer of the Mountain, the master who would be terrible only for a little
time, and would soon restore peace when he had established a dogma of moral
order. Were Moderates ever slow to give full power for the sake of order?
The next
day some one saw that the new law touched the Parliament itself. Self-defence,
the most sacred, perhaps the only, right of a prince, occurred to them, and
they protested They passed a resolution that no member could be taken before
the Revolutionar JTribunal without their consent. The following day Robespierre
again appears, again appeals to the “Marsh.” The men of order saw at once that
no danger applied to them, that the disorderly fellows up on the benches of the
Left alone were in danger. The resolution was repealed. On that day, the 24th
of Prairial of the year II.—12th of June 1794 the whole of France was at his
feet, save the armies.
The
France which had made the Revolution, and which Canton had loved, defended, and
saved, was in the Ardennes and before Ypres. There were two main bodies. One,
on the left, in the plains by the frontier towns, was opposed to a united force
of English and Austrians; the other, on the right, in the woods and deep
ravines of the Ardennes, was opposed to a strong series of Austrian posts.
These armies were not separated, but the enemy held the angle between them.
Away on the extreme right Jourdan held the Moselle valley. Pichegru had come
back to the army of the left, which in his absence had won Turcoing, and at
whose head Soudham, Moreau, and Macdonald had fought and succeeded. On the
right St. Just was throwing into the attack upon the Sambre all the energy
which had saved, before this, the army of Alsace. Five times the attempt had
been made to pierce the Austrian lines, and five times it had failed. Coburg
lay on both sides of the river; Charleroy, on the right bank, was his strong
place. The Deputies on mission, St. Just and Lebas, the same whom we shall see
standing by Robespierre at the end, were present at the last decisive check
before Charleroy itself. With the Sambre thus held, the southern army was
immobilised; the successes of the army of the north seemed almost valueless,
for Coburg held the angle between the two. Nevertheless, Turcoing bore great
fruit, for it convinced the Austrians that reinforcements were needed to meet
the French advance in the north. The allies were like a man fighting with a
sword in each hand against two opponents. Wounded in the right hand, he must
cross rapidly with the sword in his left, and so expose his left side. Thus
Coburg left the Sambre a little more exposed in order to provide temporary
reinforcements against the army that had just won Turcoing. St. Just and Carnot
were enemies; the young Robespierrian was planned to replace the organiser whom
Danton had recognised; nevertheless, they agreed at this supreme moment upon
the necessary action. St. Just from the army, Carnot from the Ministry of War
at Paris, called up Jourdan from the Moselle with over forty thousand men.
They are
wrong who imagine that Napoleon invented the attack by concentration on the
weakest point; so far as the large lines of a campaign go he inherited it from
the early Republican generals. Leaving strong places unoccupied, careless of
holding (for example) this position on the Moselle, the hurried march northward
was determined on, and a supreme effort against the Austrian lines.
By this
junction was formed that “Army of the Sambre-et-Meuse” which to this day gives
a theme for one of the noblest marching-songs of the French soldiery. Under
Jourdan were men whose names alone have something of the quality of
bugle-calls. Ney, and Kleber, and Marceau were leading them. There ran through
this new army a kind of prescience, the foreknowledge of victory, an unaccustomed
feeling of expansion and of hope. Soult speaks of it as his awakening; and
there is a fine phrase in the memoir of a contemporary which gives us some echo
of its enthusiasm: “ We always seemed to be marching into the dawn;” they felt
in every rank that the balance was turning, and that France was to be saved.
A sixth
attempt was for a sixth time foiled. The seventh succeeded. The Austrian line
was broken and Charleroy surrounded; in a week it fell. The capitulation was
hardly achieved when the .army of Coburg appeared to the north-east upon the
heights that command the left bank of the river, a plateau called that of
Fleurus.
It was
upon the 25th of June that the armies met and fought with blazing hay about
them and ripe harvest that had caught fire. Kleber recovered the left wing, as
Cromwell at Naseby, after it had given way. Marceau obstinately held the right
in front of Fleurus, as Davoust did at Austerlitz ten years later. And towards
evening the watchers in the balloon above the French ranks saw in regular and
stiff retreat the last army of the old world. By the end of Messidor the
English were in Holland, the Austrians upon the Rhine, the whole of Belgium was
in the hands of the Republic.
The sun
which set upon the death of Danton had risen again.
So in
Robespierre’s own country his fall was prepared by circumstances. At Arras, his
birthplace, one could almost hear the guns of Fleurus; he and his thin soul
belonged to those plains of the north where the Norman and the Burgundian, and
the Provençal and the Gascon, born in more generous places, were driving the
enemy before them.
St. Just
came back from the front. He at least had seen on what Revolutionary France was
really bent, and in what she was vigorous. With the superb courage that belonged
to his energy and his youth he had led the charges. Living with the soldiers,
he had seen more closely, and with more accuracy than is common in visionaries,
the needs of an army. Why did he come back to continue the insane drama whose
seven weeks of action count more with the enemies of France than all her
centuries?
Because
the armies and their victories, though affording proof of what the nation was
and of what it required, could afford that proof only to a just and even mind.
The soldiers themselves did not express a political opinion; their whole mind
was bent upon the breaking of the line, the attempt in which they had
succeeded. Of Paris, Revolutionary in the last few months, they knew little.
They judged it as our contemporaries do—on hearsay; and it seemed to them that
there stood in the capital a powerful Committee full of patriots, who had by an
intense, an almost furious energy, saved them—the soldiers. Men who risk their
lives every day and see death constantly are not likely to be horror-stricken
at an excess of rigour in government. In their eyes a number of men had fallen,
places had changed, the central power was surrounded by a tumult, but they had
been clothed and fed almost by a miracle their battles had been made possible.
The year since the great conscription had drawn them from their homes had been
for them a struggle of continual promise, ending in a great achievement.
Already the soldier was half-professional; the eager volunteer of 1892, full of
his politics, had given place to a type which the wanton policy of the old
regime was forging to its own destruction. For it was forging the veterans who
cared more and more for the Revolutionary thing, and less and less for the
discussions and the theories, till at last they produced the Empire.
St. Just
therefore could not warn Robespierre. St. Just himself had learnt no lesson.
His ideal was still in his eyes the salvation of France, and even of the world;
the victory of Fleurus only made it the more possible to carry his ideal out in
action. He had seen the emigrants who were taken in that battle spared for the
first time by the French soldiery, but he did not recognise the tremendous
import of this, nor appreciate what our own time has thoroughly learnt, that it
is the success or the failure of the national defence which rules the temper of
a nation.
When the
news of Fleurus became known in Paris the law of Prairial had been in action
for nearly three weeks. By the time the victory and its meaning had fully sunk
into the mind of the capital half the short period of Robespierre had expired.
How much was due to fear upon his part, how much to mere blindness, we cannot
tell, but the very moment when the necessity for the Terror patently
disappeared was the moment chosen by him for the aggravation of his system.
He
attacked the Mountain.
It will
be remembered that the Convention had feared for itself when it gave the full
power into his hands. On the 11th of June Bourdon from the Oise had carried a
motion which would have defended the deputies, but which Robespierre had caused
to be cancelled upon the following day.
With an
attack, however, appearing as a reality instead of remaining as a threat, even
the “Marsh” grew afraid. He put into his speech an excellent maxim, that “not
success of armies abroad or on the frontier are the greatness of a nation, but
the virtue of its private citizens within” (21st Messidor)—a truth appearing
perhaps at the very worst moment, for it translated itself at once in the minds
of his audience into “the victories mean nothing to me; the guillotine is for
the defence not of the nation but of my dogmas.” And his faith went on
sacrificing its innumerable victims.
Another
and a final element was added to the forces against him. The Committee began to
refuse his leadership. It must be remembered that Robespierre was not absolute
master in the sense in which (for example) an English general would be master
of an Indian province after the suppression of a mutiny. Circumstances, immense
popularity, above all the kind of men who composed the great Committee, are the
explanation of his power. His power was a fact, but a fact based on no
theoretical right, and therefore possessed of no elements of endurance. Even
the Committee was in the eyes of all the governed, and of some of its own
members, only the servant of the national welfare. Two men upon it were
Robespierrians—Couthon and St. Just; one was a turncoat by nature—Barrère; two
more were men of the Hébertian type, most unreliable for an idealist to deal with—Billaud
and Collot Finally there remains Carnot, the worker, and four others—the two
Prieurs, Lindet and St. André.
Robespierre
could be virtually a master, but a master only on the tolerance of superior
though latent force. He could inspire terror by the common knowledge that the
machinery was in his hands, that its terrible punishment was practically his to
inflict at pleasure. But something put it into his hand, and something could
take it away. It cannot be too often repeated, if we wish to understand the
Revolution, that from the fall of Lafayette to the 13th of October 1795 there
was no disciplined armed force at the service of the Government, there was
nobody better armed or better drilled than the man in the street—not even
gunners, the first necessity of modern masters, for the very artillery was
amateur; above all, there was no armed body whose members obeyed without
question, who were, as a good army must be, a rigid instrument of government
framed upon a device which multiplies a hundredfold the strength of each man in
the public service. The “strong men” of history, whom our reactionaries delight
to honour, have always had such an instrument at their disposition, but when
there is no one to fire at a command, your strong man is like any other, save
that he is a little weaker for shouting.
What
then was the ultimate master which permitted Robespierre to rule? It was
composed of several forces, and in its division is to be found the secret of
its inertia.
Firstly,
the Convention, mutilated as it was, was granted by all to be the nearest
representative of the nation. What the majority voted was done. It exercised a
very great moral influence, and if it had shown that influence so slightly, it
was because its organisation was contemptible—a mass of individuals, with no
traditions of action or of grouping, a crowd in which the fear of each that
another might be his enemy caused the sum of its individual cries to be
anything but the integrate expression of its corporate will. Well, this crowd had
had one formidable enemy. The right of the Convention had been combated
by the force of the well-organised Commune, The Commune used to be a
mirror of at least half of Paris; it had lost this character. It was nothing
now but a group of Robespierrians, and the Convention was the stronger for the
change.
Secondly,
there was the material force—the populace of Paris. They had not risen hitherto
save for one or two motives—the establishment of the national defence, the
prevention of a political reaction; and they had been more turbulent and more
dangerous where the first than where the second was their cause for action.
Thirdly,
the regular initiative was in the hands of a majority of the Committee of
Public Safety.
The
moment therefore that the majority of the Committee refused to follow
Robespierre’s lead, he would have had to ascend the tribune of the Convention,
and in one of those speeches which carried to some such genuine conviction, but
to many others such still more genuine fear, he would have had to obtain a
majority for the reconstruction of the great Committee.
Now a
deliberative Assembly which is not strictly organised upon party lines, which
has no aristocratic quality and no great (because traditional) corporate pride,
is very strongly influenced by what we call “Public Opinion.” It hears reports
from the whole nation, is composed of every kind of man, regards itself
moreover as in duty bound to listen to the voices outside, meets in its lobbies
and during its recesses every species of expression.
Such a
jury is therefore the very worst before which a popular idol could present
itself when some strong adverse action had just shown his reputation to be
falling. Outvoted in Committee, condemned in Parliament, the man who had but
just now been supreme would have to turn to whatever he could find of physical
force to support him.
But that
physical force in the case of Robespierre was only the populace of Paris, and a
populace moreover whose one organising centre—the Commune—had been weakened by
himself. Once suppose him forced to depend upon a rising of the people, and the
weakness of his position is apparent; even were he still the politician of the
majority, it would be a long step from approving of his policy to risking one’s
life in a civil tumult, conscious that one was attacking every form of
constituted authority, and presumably the opinion of the whole nation, for no
principle, from no necessity, but to save a man. As we shall see, the rising to
defend him comprised but a small knot of men, and totally failed.
The man
who had not the wits to cook an egg prepared his own ruin. Carnot, whose one
idea was to work and save the frontier, he openly menaced. Robespierre
meditated the inconceivable folly of replacing Carnot’s science by the blind
activity of St. Just. In alienating Carnot and losing that possible ally,
Robespierre lost five of his colleagues on the Committee. The end of Messidor
saw him in a kind of voluntary isolation, letting the fatal machine work on,
while he stood off from the levers.
He seems
to have just felt two doubts disturbing the serenity of his fanatical
complacency. First, whether after all he was going down to posterity as he saw
himself to be—the maker of a new France, “the terror of oppressors and the
refuge of the oppressed.” (One day his eyes filled when the noise of the
tumbrils reached him, and he said, “I shall be remembered only as a slayer of
men.” So wrapped up in himself, he had not yet heard an echo of what all men
were saying.) Secondly, he wondered whether his perfect state was so near as he
had thought. The killing went on, and he got no nearer. The “anti-patriots,”
the “anti-revolutionaries,” the “anti-Robespierres” (though he did not think of
them so) passed perpetually eastward and westward daily from the prisons to the
two guillotines
By the
irony of whatever rules and laughs at men, events caused the first mutterings
to rise among the Extremists. The Terror was too mild, and above all the men
with hearts of beasts—the remainder of the Hébertists—hated a policy which
included, however fantastically, the ideal and the worship of God. They hated
his half-alliance with whatever was Christian in the Convention, and his
perpetual appeals to the Moderates.
The
Lower Committee had a partially independent life, It was known to be the policy
of Robespierre to submit this body, as he had submitted all the other organs of
government, to the great Committee of Public Safety. Hence it was in this Lower
Committee of General Security menaced as a function and as individuals,
thoroughly in touch, by its position, with the police that the conspiracy
arose. The majority of its members joined it, and from the Higher Committee
Billaud and Collot adhered. On the 7th of Thermidor (25th of July 1794) the
storm burst. Barrère read his report to the Convention, and it was an open
menace to Robespierre.
The
origins of that report merit a certain discussion. We have seen that from the
first the reports, directed by the Committee, were usually written by Barrère, and
were read to the Convention by him. On the other hand, we can discover usually
in the style, and always in the opinions of the reports, the action of whoever
led in the councils of the Committee. Thus, in the document of this nature of
which so much mention is made in chapter vi, the spirit, and evidently many of
the actual phrases, are the work of Danton.
Who drew
up Barrère’s report, whether (possibly) it was his own work, when he saw
opinion shifting away from Robespierre, or whether, as is more probable, it was
inspired by Billaud and Collot, and permitted by the five neutrals, we cannot
tell. The main fact is this, that the Committee had at least permitted to be
made in its name a public declaration hostile to the man who, through the
Committee, had ruled France.
The
report repudiated in detail the policy of the past seven weeks; it insisted on
the importance of the victories, on the iniquity of further lists of victims.
For the first time in four months the Convention acted freely; it ordered the
report to be printed and to be sent to all the Communes of France.
On the
next day Robespierre came for the last time into his accustomed place. He gave
his last speech to the Parliament. He was to appear once more, but never again
as the orator and the leader. Reading, as was his wont, not declaiming, in the
slow even voice that had compelled such attention, such enthusiasm, and such
fear, he made the last of his declarations. This speech, if no other, should be
read to understand the man. Here a theory stated with power and with precision;
there a description of those without whose condemnation the theory could not be
realised. A noble ideal based upon the scaffold; a dogma and a detailed
persecution side by side. He read it slowly from end to end, proving to
himself, and, as he thought, to his audience, the perfection of his ideal, and
the necessity of the terrible road towards it. But his audience heard nothing
of the ideal; they heard only the description of themselves.
Men of
all kinds, the mere demagogues, were in that summary, the personal enemies, the
financiers. It seems that on the manuscript from which he read even Cambon’s
name was written. But in this extreme crisis, when he was denouncing the first
men in order to save his own position, he was no longer Robespierre. It made no
difference to his fate, yet we judge him with more accuracy when we know that
he omitted the name of Cambon, and that he did not pronounce that of Carnot,
whom he had threatened in private. It was an attempt at compromise.
The
Convention heard him and his threat. Of his theories they had heard enough for
years. Yet such was the power of his slow clear utterance, of the reverence
which his following commanded, and of the idea which he expressed so well, and
in which all at heart believed, that they voted the printing and the
dissemination of the speech. Cambon and Billaud-Varennes rose to demand the
repeal of the vote. The great unwieldy assembly, or rather its great unwieldy
neutral faction, hesitated, conferred, and yielded to the demand. Then
Robespierre was doomed.
As he
was reading, as the distribution of the speech and then its repeal were being
voted, there hung above his head and that of the Parliament the flags taken in
the new victories from the English and Austrians at Turcoing, at Landrecies, at
Quesnoy, at Condé, at Valenciennes, at Fleurus, and it was they that turned the
scale.
When the
evening came the Club met, the little society of the Jacobins, which was still
the most independent and the most vital force in Paris. It had dared to elect a
president for its debates whose whole policy was antagonistic to Robespierre;
yet now it heard him and remembered its old idol. He re-read, in the same tone,
but in a more familiar surrounding and with ampler diction, the speech of the
morning, and his hearers grew wild with enthusiasm. They hissed and they turned
out Billaud and Collot, who had dared to be present; they cried out to
Robespierre that they would follow him always towards the perfect Republic; and
David, an excellent artist and a bad man, cried to him from the back, “I will
drink the hemlock with you!” but he was afraid even to acknowledge his master
when Robespierre came to die.
The
Jacobins that night were ready to rise for Robespierre. As so many minorities
have been in that city of convictions and of intense enthusiasms, they were
ready to impose themselves and their creed upon the capital and upon France;
but they did not know to what a handful they had been reduced in the last seven
weeks. All night the conspiracy against Robespierre worked hard. Boissy
D’Anglas, the leader of the “Marsh,” was brought over. To him and his followers
Robespierre was pointed out as the tyrant; to what was left of the Mountain he
was denounced as the moderate and the compromiser. But, above all, he was, to
the great bulk of the Convention, the enemy who had destroyed all civil order
in pursuit of his mad theories, and who had even held the victories of no
account.
The
Parliament met the next morning, on the 9th of Thermidor (27th of July). It was
a year to a day since Robespierre had joined the great Committee; but it was
for the condemnation of Robespierre that they met. The great hall waited for a
coming tumult. First into the tribune went St. Just, with his beautiful face
and strong bearing, determined in oratory as in the battles to strike at once
and lead a charge. He was eloquent, for he was trying to save his friend; he
boldly attempted argument, a compromise, anything; called it “saving the
Republic.” “Let us end his domination if you will, but let the government still
be that of the Revolution, and let us draw up such rules as shall save us from
arbitrary power without destroying the motive force of the national demand.”
The sentiment was precisely that of the Convention, but the speaker was known
to be merely the young bodyguard of their enemy.
Tallien
called out from the right, “Pull back the curtain,” and, though the fellow was
an actor, he had struck the right note, St. Just could never defend Robespierre;
it would have been a cloak for continuing the Terror. The Convention applauded,
and from applause turned to crying down St. Just in a public roar of fear and
hatred.
Then
twice Robespierre tried to speak; the hubbub silenced him. During a lull in the
storm they voted the arrest of Henriot. It meant the transference of such
pitiful armed force as he commanded from the hand of a friend to that of an
enemy. Robespierre made a last effort to rescind that order. He was not heard.
Tallien
was given the tribune by the Speaker (Collot was Speaker that day, and Collot
had been turned out by the Jacobins the night before). Tallien spoke
theatrically, as he always did, but to the point. Robespierre, he said, had
plotted to destroy the assembly for his purposes; he quoted the speech of the
day before. While Barrère, the turncoat, stood looking this way and that, not
knowing how things would turn. Once more Robespierre attempted a reply; he only
raised a storm that drowned his voice.
When he
saw that full speech was denied him, he turned from the place where he stood
towards the “Marsh,” the Moderates, and said, “I appeal to you who are just and
who are not conspiring with these assassins;” but the “Marsh” was lost to him
they also cried him down.
A little
silence followed. They saw Robespierre attempting for a fifth time to speak,
but the agony of the night and the fearful struggle of the morning had overcome
him at last: his voice could not be heard though he tried to articulate. Gamier
of the Aube called to him across the floor of the hall, “The blood of Danton
chokes you.” It was the truest thing said in that wild meeting.
Before
the silence was broken, Louchet, an unknown man, rose and proposed the arrest,
saying openly what all thought: “No one will deny that Robespierre has played
the master; let us vote his arrest.” Then Robespierre found his voice. He went
up four steps above his usual seat, to a place where, high up and from the
left, from the summit of what had been the Mountain in the old days, he could
see the whole of that multitudinous assembly, with whose aid he had hoped to
regenerate France and to save mankind. Beneath him as a host, like the dim
pictures of Martin’s Milton, rank on rank, he saw so many heads that it must
have seemed to him a nation. He remembered all his dreams of a perfect state,
of men living in equality, with no one oppressed and no one oppressing, of a
government based upon the clear will of all, and upon the civic virtues which
he had preached, till there should rise the perfect Republic, an exemplar for
all the nations. He saw that he was doomed, and with him all his dreams.
Perhaps, also, he saw the armed despotism which he had twice prophesied coming
in his place. To the last he did not understand his folly, and he replied to
the demand of Louchet, “Vote for my death.”
Le Bas,
who had been with St. Just in the Ardennes, who had helped to make the great
army of Sambre-et-Meuse, and Robespierre the younger, another honest man, came
and did what David failed to do—they said they would die with him, and took his
hands in theirs. The Committee passed to the vote, and the three were taken
away with St. Just and with Couthon. The scene that follows is the end of the
Revolution in Paris.
Twice at
least in the course of the preceding five years Paris had risen against the law
and had removed an obstacle or a man for the sake of the Revolution. The random
Municipality of 1789 (which for all its disorder was the parent of the puissant
modern system of Communes) is an example in point; the 2nd of June is another.
Ultimately the people of Paris were the only force on which government rested,
and it was to them that the final appeal was made.
The
Commune possessed the initiative in this matter it was the sole centre of Paris
in theory; and now that the clubs were all in decay (save the Jacobins), now
that the great orators were exiled or dead, and that the Sections themselves
did not meet, the Commune was also the only centre in fact. But the Commune, it
will be remembered, had become a Robespierrian thing. It determined to rise
against the Convention.
The
Convention had ordered the arrest of Henriot, who was commander of the armed
force (such as it was) of the town. It sent his successor, Hesmart to do the
work. But the head of a number of pikes and guns would not submit to a man who
represented only the law, and instead of Hesmart arresting Henriot, it was
Henriot who arrested Hesmart.
Meanwhile
the other officers of the Commune displayed the same energy, the same rapidity
of execution and design which under better leaders and for a better cause had
hitherto succeeded. Lescot-Payot (the Robespierrian mayor who had been put into
the place of Pache on the 21 of Floréal), and Payan the national agent, were at
the head of the movement. They sent orders to the prisons to refuse the
arrested deputies, they gave Henriot the formal order to employ his full force
and act. They raised the Jacobins. They formed a committee of nine who were to
take over the government; they ordered the arrest of their principal enemies in
the Convention, and most important of all, they convened the Sections.
They had
only a night to work in—the 9th Thermidor to the 10th—and their work had the
energy of a fever; but the greatest factor of all was lacking the fever did not
spread. The inertia of the people, even their disapproval, was evident as they
proceeded; the majority of such Sections as did meet stood aloof from or
condemned the cause of Robespierre.
While it
was still just light, between eight and nine in the evening, Robespierre, whom
the keepers of the Luxemburg prison had refused, was brought to the Mairie, and
there one after the other all the arrested deputies came, profiting by the
official routine, for the Mairie was the “right place” officially for prisoners
when a difficulty arose as to imprisonment within Paris. But official routine
had a strange bedfellow that night, for while the officials took the prisoners
there, the small band of rebels, who knew of no place more friendly, brought
there also those whom they had delivered by force. Robespierre was again with
the strongest of his friends—his brother, St. Just, Couthon; he was surrounded
by an organised and legal body, the Commune, which had risen in his defence;
they passed to the Hotel de Ville, and outside, on the Place de Grève, there
gathered between ten o’clock and eleven a fairly large group of the National
Guard. But there was no order among them, nor any accurate knowledge among
their officers as to what was to be done. From the windows of the room where
Robespierre and his companions sat, there could be dimly seen a moving crowd of
mingled citizens and guards, discussing rather than preparing for action.
Robespierre
refused to put himself at the head of the movement; at least it is only thus
that we can explain the delay and the confusion. He was to the last the strange
mixture of lawyer and pedant and idealist. He would not act without the legal
right, for his pedantry forbade it, nor move with an armed minority, because,
judged by his theories, it would have been a crime. Perhaps at the very last he
decided to move: there exists a document authorising a march on the Convention,
and at its base the first three letters of his name—the signature unfinished,
interrupted.
Meanwhile
the Convention had found a new energy and a power of corporate action to which
it had been long a stranger—each man there was defending his life. Legendre,
with a small force, went and closed the Jacobins. Barras was given the command
of such armed men as could be gathered; the two committees sent emissaries who
appealed with success to the Sections. The Convention was the law which had
always meant so much to the people; it was the authority of the constitution.
Its majority, obeyed when it was in lethargy, could not but be successful when
it awoke. All Paris defended it.
At
midnight one of the sudden thunder-showers which are common in the Seine valley
at that season cleared what was left of the crowd before the Hotel de Ville.
They had discussed both sides, and they had not decided—hardly an army for
rebellion; they had doubted what business they had there, and with the rain
they went home. Yet it was not till two hours after, in the early morning, that
the little band of the Convention came into the square. They found it almost
empty, with here and there a small group standing on the wet cobble-stones,
sleepy but curious.
Bourdon
and a few policemen went into the Hotel de Ville and found no defenders. They
went up to the room where the conspirators sat.
Robespierre
was on the ground with his jaw broken by a pistol-shot.
At
half-past seven in the evening of that day (the 10th Thermidor) twenty-two of
the Robespierrians were taken in three carts to the guillotine. Robespierre
himself, half-unconscious from his wound, stood propped against the side of the
cart, his head bandaged, his arms bound, his chin upon his breast Ropes also
bound his body to the sides of the tumbril. He passed the house where Duplay
had sheltered him, and where he had hidden himself, so as not to hear the noise
of the executioners’ carts. Now beneath him the heavy wheels were making the
same sound on the ruts of the Rue St. Honoré At a cross-street the cart stopped
to let pass the funeral of Madame Aigué, who had killed herself the day before
from fear of Robespierre.
As they
neared the Place of the Revolution, where Louis and Danton had suffered,
probably at the turning of the Rue St. Honoré, where the guillotine came in sight
and where Danton had sung his song, a woman came forward from the crowd
doubtless some one whom his tyranny had directly bereaved and struck
Robespierre a blow. For sixteen hours he had not spoken nor made a sign, but
when he felt through this blow the popular hatred, he made a gesture of
contempt and of despair, he shrugged his shoulders, but kept his innumerable
thoughts within the bandages. “De mourir pour le peuple et d’en être
abhorré.”
* * * * * * * *
Then—so
the greatest of French historians tell us—France marched down a broad road to
the tomb where she has left two millions of men.
But the
armies of the great twenty years cannot be stated in the terms of one man’s
ambition, nor summed up in any of the simple formulae which a just hatred of
Caesarism has framed to explain them. At the root of every battle of the Empire
was the organisation and the enthusiasm of 1793. The tactics of Austerlitz and
of Jena were learned in Flanders; the enthusiasm of the Guard itself came in
clear descent from the exaltation of the Sambre-et-Meuse.
In this
book we have attempted to judge the first man of a great crisis in relation to
his time; it is still more essential that, when we consider the after-effects
of his action, a whole nation under arms should stand in the right historical
framework, its gigantic effort part and parcel of a supreme necessity.
We can
understand, we can speak rationally, and therefore truly, of Danton, when we
show him above all loving and defending France and the Revolutionary Thing:
that same appreciation will make us follow clearly the continuous development
of his action. It is hardly too much to say that, until Tilsit, the French had
to advance or be crushed—nation, creed, and men.
The men
and the armies must be for us the men and the armies that gave a new vigour to
Europe; the details of their action should not be the matter of our judgment,
but their relation to the whole community—its needs, its defence, its faith.
As the
time grows greater between that period and our own, a just proportion imposes
itself. The flame which, close at hand, burnt in a formless furnace is
beginning to assume a certain shape. From a standpoint so distant that no
living memory bridges the gulf, we can measure the light, the heat, and even the
fuel of that flame.
As to
its final meaning in our society, every day makes that clearer; and, to change
the metaphor, this much becomes more and more apparent, that through whatever
crises the Western civilisation is to pass, and whatever form its edifice will
finally take, when the noise of the building is over, the corner-stone, with
its immense strength and its precision of line, was planned by the philosophy
and was hewn by the force of the Revolution. Civilisations die, and ours was
dying before that wind swept across Europe.
It would
have been a poor excuse for leaving unremoved the rubble, the dust, and the
putrescence of the old world to have pleaded that the decay was the action of
centuries, and that old things alone were worthy of reverence. Old things alone
are worthy of reverence, but old things which have grown old upon just and sure
foundations, to which time has added ornament and the satisfaction of
harmonious colour, without destroying the main lines, and without sapping the
strength by which they live.
The new
foundations alone stand at the present day. They are crude, they satisfy
nothing in us permanently, they are very far from affording that sentiment of
content which is the first requisite of a happy civilisation. But time will do
in this case, as it has always done in every other, the work of harmony and of
completion. The final society will not be without its innumerable complexity of
detail, its humour, and its inner life. Certainly it will not long remain a
stranger to the unseen; but it will be built upon 1793.
Meanwhile
the light grows on the origins. The personal bitterness which the struggle
produced has passed. It is a pious memory in this or that family in France to
give itself still the name of a Revolutionary faction; but the hatred that has
produced confusion in honest critics, and that has furnished such ample
material for false history, that hatred is disappearing in France. The
vendettas have ceased, and the grosser of the calumnies are no longer heard.
The history of the Revolution began to be possible when Louis Blanc sat down to
curse the upheaval that had killed his father, and ended by producing the work
which more than any other exalted the extreme Revolutionary ideal.
The
story of that time is now like a photographic negative, which a man fixes,
washing away the white cloud from the clean detail of the film. Point after
point, then more rapidly whole spaces, stand out precise and true. And the
certitude which he feels that the underlying picture is an accurate
reminiscence of Nature comes to us also when we make out and fix some passage
in the Revolution, cleared of its mass of hearsay, of vituperation, of
ignorance, and of mere sound.
We are beginning
to see a great picture, consonant in its details, and consecutive in its
action. The necessity of reform the light of the ideal striking men’s minds
after a long sleep, the hills first and afterwards the plains; privilege and
all the interests of the few alarmed and militant; the menace of attack and the
preparation of defence; the opposition of extremes on either side of the
frontier, growing at an increasing speed, till at last, each opposite principle
mutually exciting the other, as armatories their magnets, from a little current
of opinion rose a force that none could resist. The governments of the whole
world were for the destruction of the French people, and the French people were
for the rooting out of everything, good and evil, which was attached, however
faintly, to the old regime.
The
rhetoricians passed in the smoke of the fire, unsubstantial, full of words that
could lead and inspire, but empty of acts that could govern the storm. From
their passing, which is as vague as a vision, we hear faintly the
“Marseillaise” of the Girondins.
The men
of action and of the crisis passed. They burnt in the heat they themselves had
kindled, but in that furnace the nation was run, and forged, and made. Then
came the armies: France grown cold from the casting-pit, but bent upon action,
and able to do.
Wherever
France went by, the Revolutionary Thing remained the legacy of her conviction
and of her power, It remains with a kind of iron laughter for those who judge
the idea as a passing madness. The philosophers have decided upon a new
philosophy; the lawyers have clearly proved that there has been no change; the
rhetoric has been thoroughly laughed down, enthusiasm has grown ridiculous, and
the men of action are cursed. But in the wake of the French march citizens are
found who own the soil and are judged by an equal code of laws; nationalities
have been welded, patriotism has risen at the call of the new patriotic creed;
Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Italy have known themselves as something more
than the delimitations of sovereigns. Nor was there any abomination of the old
decay, its tortures, its ignominies, its privileges, its licensed insults, or
its slaveries, but she utterly stamped them out. In Germany, in Austria, in
Italy, they disappeared. Only in one dark corner they remained—the great
Northern field, where France herself grew powerless from cold, and from whence
an unknown rule and the advance of relentless things menaces Europe now.
But with
the mention of that frozen place there comes a thought older than all our
theories—the mourning for the dead Danton helped to make us, and was killed:
his effort has succeeded, but the tragedy remains. The army at whose source he
stood, the captain who inherited his action, were worn out in forging a new
world. And I will end this book by that last duty of mourning, as we who hold
to immortality yet break our hearts for the dead.
There is
a legend among the peasants in Russia of a certain sombre, mounted figure,
unreal, only an outline and a cloud, that passed away to Asia, to the east and
to the north. They saw him move along their snows through the long mysterious
twilights of the northern autumn in silence, with the head bent and the reins
in the left hand loose, following some enduring purpose, reaching towards an
ancient solitude and repose. They say it was Napoleon. After him there trailed
for days the shadows of the soldiery, vague mists bearing faintly the forms of
companies of men. It was as though the cannon-smoke of Waterloo, borne on the
light west wind of that June day, had received the spirits of twenty years of
combat, and had drifted farther and farther during the fall of the year over
the endless plains.
But
there was no voice and no order. The terrible tramp of the Guard and the sound
that Heine loved, the dance of the French drums, was extinguished; there was no
echo of their songs, for the army was of ghosts and was defeated. They passed
in the silence which we can never pierce, and somewhere remote from men they
sleep in bivouac round the most splendid of human swords.