Equally idle would it be to dilate on his sen sual excesses. That in Barère, as in the whole breed of Neros, Caligulas, and Domitians whom he resembled, voluptuousness was mingled with cruelty; that he withdrew, twice in every decade, from the work of blood to the smiling gardens of Clichy, and there forgot public cares in the madness of wine, and in the arms of courtesans. has often been repeated. M. Hippolyte Carnot does not altogether deny the truth of these stories, but justly observes that Barère's dissipation was not carried to such a point as to interfere with his industry. Nothing can be more true. Barère was by no means so much addicted to debauchery as to neglect the work of murder. It was his boast that, even during his hours of recreation, he cut out work for the Revolutionary Tribunal. To those who expressed a fear that his exertions would hurt his health, he gaily answered that he was less busy than they thought. "The guillotine," he said, "does all;" the "guillotine governs." For ourselves, we are much more disposed to look indulgently on the pleasures which he allowed to himself, than on the pain which he inflicted on his neighbours.

tried to revive the hopes of the aristocracy. "Whoever," he said, "is nobly born, is a man to be suspected. Every priest, every frequenter of the old court, every lawyer, every banker, is a man to be suspected. Every person who grumbles at the course which the Revolution takes, is a man to be suspected. There are whole castes already tried and condemned. There are callings which carry their doom with them. There are relations of blood which the law regards with an evil eye. Republicans of France!" yelled the renegade Girondist, the old enemy of the Mountain-"Republicans of France! the Brissotines led you by gentle means to slavery. The Mountain leads you by strong measures to freedom. Oh! who can count the evils which a false compassion may produce?" When the friends of Danton mustered courage to express a wish that the Convention would at least hear him, in his own defence, before it sent him to certain death, the voice of Barère was the loudest in opposition to their prayer. When the crimes of Lebon, one of the worst, if not the very worst, of the vicegerents of the committee of public safety, had so maddened the people of the Departments of the North, that they resorted to the desperate "Atque utinam his potius nugis tota illa dedisset expedient of imploring the protection of the Tempora sævitiæ, claras quibus abatulit urbi Convention, Barère pleaded the cause of the Illustresque animas, impune ac vindice nullo." accused tyrant, and threatened the petitioners with the utmost vengeance of the government. An immoderate appetite for sensual gratifica"These charges," he said, "have been sug-tion is undoubtedly a blemish on the fame of gested by wily aristocrats. The man who crushes the enemies of the people, though he may be hurried by his zeal into some excesses, can never be a proper object of censure. The proceedings of Lebon may have been a little harsh as to form." One of the small irregularities thus gently censured was this: Lebon kept a wretched man a quarter of an hour under the knife of the guillotine, in order to torment him, by reading to him, before he was despatched, a letter, the contents of which were supposed to be such as would aggravate even the bitterness of death. 66 But what," proceeded Barère," is not permitted to the hatred of a republican against aristocracy? How many generous sentiments atone for what may perhaps seem acrimonious in the prosecution of public enemies? Revolutionary measures are always to be spoken of with respect. Liberty is a virgin whose veil it is not lawful to lift."

Henry the Fourth, of Lord Somers, of Mr. Fox. But the vices of honest men are the virtues of Barère.

And now Barère had become a really cruel man. It was from mere pusillanimity that he had perpetrated his first great crimes. But the whole history of our race proves that the taste for the misery of others is a taste which minds not naturally ferocious may too easily acquire, and which, when once acquired, is as strong as any of the propensities with which we are born. A very few months had sufficed to bring this man into a state of mind in which images of despair, wailing, and death, had an exhilarating effect on him; and inspired him as wine and love inspire men of free and joyous natures. The cart creaking under its daily freight of victims, ancient men, and lads, and fair young girls, the binding of the hands, the thrusting of the head out of the little national After this, it would be idle to dwell on facts sash-window, the crash of the axe, the pool of which would indeed, of themselves, suffice to blood beneath the scaffold, the heads rolling by render a name infamous, but which makes no scores in the panier-these things were to him perceptible addition to the great infamy of what Lalage and a cask of Falernian were to Barère. It would be idle, for example, to relate Horace, what Rosette and a bottle of iced how he, a man of letters, a member of an aca-champagne are to De Béranger. As soon as demy of inscriptions, was foremost in that war he began to speak of slaughter, his heart against learning, art, and history which dis- seemed to be enlarged, and his fancy to begraced the Jacobin government; how he re- come unusually fertile of conceits and gascocommended a general conflagration of libraries; nades. Robespierre, St. Just, and Billaud, how he proclaimed that all records of events whose barbarity was the effect of earnest and anterior to the Revolution ought to be destroy-gloomy hatred, were, in his view, men who ed; how he laid waste the abbey of St. Denis, pulled down monuments consecrated by the veneration of ages, and scattered on the wind the dust of ancient kings. He was, in truth, seldom so well employed as when he turned for a moment from making war on the living to make war on the dead.

VOL. V.-81

made a toil of pleasure. Cruelty was no such melancholy business, to be gone about with an austere brow and a whining tone; it was a re creation, fitly accompanied by singing and laughing. In truth, Robespierre and Barère might be well compared to the two renowned. hangmen of Louis the Eleventh. They were

3 H⚫

alike insensible of pity, alike bent on havoc. But, while they murdered, one of them frowned and canted, the other grinned and joked. For our own part, we prefer Jean qui pleure to Jean qui rit.

of the Girondists, in the murder of the Queen, in the destruction of Lyons, he durst not show himself within that sacred precinct. At one meeting of the society, a member complained that the committee to which the supreme direction of affairs was intrusted, after all the changes which had been made, still contained one man who was not trustworthy. Robes. pierre, whose influence over the Jacobins was boundless, undertook the defence of his colleague, owned there was some ground for what had been said, but spoke highly of Barère's industry and aptitude for business. This seasonable interposition silenced the accuser; but it was long before the neophyte could ven ture to appear at the club.

In the midst of the funereal gloom which overhung Paris, a gaiety stranger and more ghastly than the horrors of the prison and the scaffold distinguished the dwelling of Barère. Every morning a crowd of suitors assembled to implore his protection. He came forth in his rich dressing-gown, went round the antechamber, dispensed smiles and promises among the obsequious crowd, addressed himself with peculiar animation to every handsome woman who appeared in the circle, and complimented her in the florid style of Gascony on the bloom of her cheeks and the lustre of her eyes. When he had enjoyed the fear and anxiety of his suppliants, he dismissed them, and flung all their memorials unread into the fire. This was the best way, he conceived, to prevent arrears of business from accumulating. Here he was only an imitator. Cardinal Dubois had been in the habit of clearing his table of papers in the same way. Nor was this the only point in which we could point out a resemblance between the worst statesman of the monarchy and the worst statesman of the Re-something to bequeath to the surviving tyrants public.

At length a masterpiece of wickedness, unique, we think, even among Barère's great achievements, obtained his full pardon even from that rigid conclave. The insupportable tyranny of the committee of public safety had at length brought the minds of men, and even of women, into a fierce and hard temper, which defied or welcomed death. The life which might be any morning taken away, in conse quence of the whisper of a private enemy, seemed of little value. It was something to die after smiting one of the oppressors; it was

a terror not inferior to that which they had Of Barère's peculiar vein of pleasantry a themselves inspired. Human nature, hunted notion may be formed from an anecdote which and worried to the utmost, now turned furiousone of his intimate associates, a juror of the ly to bay. Fouquier Tinville was afraid to Revolutionary Tribunal, has related. A cour. walk the streets; a pistol was snapped at tesan who bore a conspicuous part in the Collot D'Herbois; a young girl, animated ap orgies of Clichy, implored Barère to use his parently by the spirit of Charlotte Corday, power against a head-dress which did not suit attempted to obtain an interview with Robes her style of face, and which a rival beauty was pierre. Suspicions arose; she was searched; trying to bring into fashion. One of the ma- and two knives were found about her. She gistrates of the capital was summoned, and was questioned, and spoke of the Jacobin received the necessary orders. Aristocracy, domination with resolute scorn and aversion. Barère said, was again rearing its front. These It is unnecessary to say that she was sent to new wigs were counter-revolutionary. He had the guillotine. Barère declared from the trireason to know that they were made out of the bune that the cause of these attempts was long fair hair of handsome aristocrats who evident. Pitt and his guineas had done the had died by the national chopper. Every lady whole. The English government had organ who adorned herself with the relics of crimi-ized a vast system of murder, had armed the nals might justly be suspected of incivism. hand of Charlotte Corday, and had now, by This ridiculous lie imposed on the authorities of Paris. Female citizens were solemnly warned against the obnoxious ringlets, and were left to choose between their head-dresses and their heads. Barère's delight at the success of this facetious fiction was quite extravagant; he could not tell the story without going into such convulsions of laughter as made his hearers hope that he was about to choke. There was something peculiarly tickling and exhilarating to his mind in this grotesque combination of the frivolous with the horrible, of false locks and curling irons with spouting arteries and reeking hatchets.

similar means, attacked two of the most eminent friends of liberty in France. It is need. less to say, that these imputations were not only false, but destitute of all show of truth Nay, they were demonstrably absurd; for the assassins to whom Barère referred rushed on certain death, a sure proof that they were not hirelings. The whole wealth of England would not have bribed any sane person to do what Charlotte Corday did. But when we consider her as an enthusiast, her conduct is perfectly natural. Even those French writers who are childish enough to believe that the English government contrived the inferna But though Barère succeeded in earning the machine, and strangled the Emperor Paul, honourable nicknames of the Witling of Terror, have fully acquitted Mr. Pitt of all share in and the Anacreon of the Guillotine, there was the death of Marat and in the attempt on Roone place where it was long remembered to bespierre. Yet on calumnies so futile as those his disadvantage, that he had, for a time, talked which we have mentioned, did Barère ground the language of humanity and moderation. a motion at which all Christendom stood That place was the Jacobin Club. Even after aghast. He proposed a decree that no quarter he had borne the chief part in the massacre' should be given to any English or Hanoverian

oldier. His Carmagnole was worthy of the | lains. Not an Englishman whom the republiroposition with which it concluded. "That cans could reach is now living. How many prisoners should you guess that we have made? One single prisoner is the result of this great day."

e Englishman should be spared, that for the ves of George, for the human machines of Jork, the vocabulary of our armies should contain such a word as generosity, this is what And now this bad man's craving for blood the National Convention cannot endure. War had become insatiable. The more he quaffed, to the death against every English soldier. If the more he thirsted. He had begun with the last year, at Dunkirk, quarter had been refused English; but soon he came down with a proto them when they asked it on their knees, if position for new massacres. "All the troops," our troops had exterminated them all, instead he said, "of the coalesced tyrants in garrison of suffering them to infest our fortresses by at Condé, Valenciennes, Le Quesnoy, and Lantheir presence, the English government would drecies, ought to be put to the sword unless not have renewed its attack on our frontiers they surrender at discretion in twenty-four this year. It is only the dead man who never hours. The English, of course, will be admitcomes back. What is this moral pestilence ted to no capitulation whatever. With the which has introduced into our armies false | English we have no treaty but death. As to ideas of humanity? That the English were the rest, surrender at discretion in twenty-four to be treated with indulgence was the philan-hours, or death, these are our conditions. If thropic notion of the Brissotines; it was the the slaves resist, let them feel the edge of the patriotic practice of Dumourier. But hu- sword." And then he waxed facetious, "On manity consists in exterminating our enemies. these terms the Republic is willing to give No mercy to the execrable Englishman. Such a lesson in the art of war." At that jest, some are the sentiments of the true Frenchman; for hearers worthy of such a speaker, set up a he knows that he belongs to a nation revolu. laugh. Then he became serious again. "Let tionary as nature, powerful as freedom, ardent the enemy perish," he cried; "I have already as the saltpetre which she has just torn from said it from this tribune. It is only the dead the entrails of the earth. Soldiers of liberty, man who never comes back. Kings will not when victory places Englishmen at your mer-conspire against us in the grave. Armies will cy, strike! None of them must return to the servile soil of Great Britain; none must pollute the free soil of France."

not fight against us when they are annihilated. Let our war with them be a war of extermination. What pity is due to slaves whom the emperor leads to war under the cane; whom the King of Prussia beats to the shambles with the flat of the sword; and whom the Duke of York makes drunk with rum and gin?" And at the rum and gin the Mountain and the gal.

The Convention, thoroughly tamed and silenced, acquiesced in Barère's motion without debate. And now at last the doors of the Jacobin Club were thrown open to the disciple who had surpassed his masters. He was admitted a member by acclamation, and was soon se-leries laughed again. lected to preside.

If Barère had been able to effect his pur

For a time he was not without hope that his pose, it is difficult to estimate the extent of the decree would be carried into full effect. Intel- | calamity which he would have brought on the ligence arrived from the seat of war of a sharp human race. No government, however averse contest between some French and English to cruelty, could, in justice to its own subjects, troops, in which the republicans had the ad- have given quarter to enemies who gave none. vantage, and in which no prisoners had been Retaliation would have been, not merely justimade. Such things happen occasionally in fiable, but a sacred duty. It would have been all wars. Barère, however, attributed the fe- necessary for Howe and Nelson to make every rocity of this combat to his darling decree, and French sailor whom they took walk the plank. entertained the Convention with another Car- England has no peculiar reason to dread the magnole. introduction of such a system. On the con"The republicans," he said, "saw a divisiontrary, the operation of Barère's new law of war in red uniform at a distance. The red-coats are attacked with the bayonet. Not one of them escapes the blows of the republicans. All the red-ccats have been killed. No mercy, no indulgence, has been shown towards the vil-prisoners in England was not greater than the

* M. Hippolyte Carnot does his best to excuse this

decree. His abuse of England is merely laughable. England has managed to deal with enemies of a very different sort from either himself or his hero. One disgraceful blunder, however, we think it right to

notice

would have been more unfavourable to his countrymen than to ours; for we believe that, from the beginning to the end of the war, there never was a time at which the number of French

number of English prisoners in France; and So, we apprehend, it will be in all wars while England retains her maritime superiority. Had the murderous decree of the Convention been in force from 1794 to 1815, we are satisfied that, M Hippolyte Carnot asserts that a motion similar to for every Englishman slain by the French, at that of Bareie was made in the English Parliament by least three Frenchmen would have been put to the late Lord Fitzwilliam. This assertion is faise. We the sword by the English. It is therefore, nul defy M. Hippolyte Carnot to state the date and terms of the motion of which he speaks. We do not accuse as Englishmen, but as members of the great bim of intentional misrepresentation; but we confi- society of mankind, that we speak with indig dently accuse him of extreme ignorance and temerity nation and horror of the change which Barere Our readers will be amused to learn on what authority he has ventured to publish such a fable He quotes, not attempted to introduce. The mere slaughter the Journals of the Lords, not the Parliamentary De-would have been the smallest part of the evil. bates; ut a ranting message of the Executive Direc- The butchering of a single unarmed man in cold blood, under an act of the legislature,

tory to the Five Hundred, a message, too, the whole meaning of which he has utterly misunderstood.

would have produced more evil than the car- in the camps. To fling people by scores

nage of ten such fields as Albuera. Public law would have been subverted from the foundations; national enmities would have been inflamed to a degree of rage which, happily, it is not easy for us to conceive; cordial peace would have been impossible. The moral character of the European nations would have been rapidly and deeply corrupted; for in all countries those men whose calling is to put their lives in jeopardy for the defence of the public weal enjoy high consideration, and are considered as the best arbitrators on points of honour and manly bearing. With the standard of morality established in the military profession, the general standard of morality must, to a great extent, sink or rise. It is, therefore, a fortunate circumstance, that during a long course of years, respect for the weak, and clemency towards the vanquished, have been considered as qualities not less essential to the accomplished soldier than personal courage. How long would this continue to be the case, if the slaying of prisoners were a part of the daily duty of the warrior? What man of kind and generous nature would, under such a system, willingly bear arms? Who, that was compelled to bear arms, would long continue kind and generous? And is it not certain that, if barbarity towards the helpless became the characteristic of military men, the taint must rapidly spread to civil and to domestic life, and must show itself in all the dealings of the strong with the weak, of husbands with wives, of employers with workmen, of creditors with debtors?

But, thank God, Barère's decree was a mere dead letter. It was to be executed by men very different from those who, in the interior of France, were the instruments of the committee of public safety, who prated at Jacobin Clubs, and ran to Fouquier Tinville with charges of incivism against women whom they could not seduce, and bankers from whom they could not extort money. The warriors who, under Hoche, had guarded the walls of Dunkirk, and who, under Kléber, had made good the defence of the wood of Monceaux, shrank with horror from an office more degrading than that of the hangman. "The Convention," said an officer to his men," has sent orders that all the English prisoners shall be shot." We will not shoot them," answered a stout-hearted sergeant. "Send them to the Convention. If the deputies take pleasure in killing a prisoner, they may kill him themselves, and eat him too, like savages as they are." This was the sentiment of the whole army. Buonaparte, who thoroughly understood war, who at Jaffa and elsewhere gave ample proof that he was not unwilling to strain the laws of war to their utmost rigour, and whose hatred of England amounted to a folly, always spoke of Barère's decree with loathing, and boasted that the army had refused to obey the Convention.

Such disobedience on the part of any other class of citizens would have been instantly punished by wholesale massacre; but the committee of public safety was aware that the discipline which had tamed the unwarlike population of the fields and cities might not answer

t

of a boat, and, when they catch hold of it, to chop off their fingers with a hatchet, is undoubtedly a very agreeable pastime for a thorough-bred Jacobin, when the sufferers are, as at Nantes, old confessors, young girls, or women with child. But such sport might prove a little dangerous if tried upon grim ranks of grenadiers, marked with the scars of Hondschoote, and singed by the smoke of Fleurus.

Barère, however, found some consolation. If he could not succeed in murdering the English and the Hanoverians, he was amply indemnified by a new and vast slaughter of his own countrymen and countrywomen. If the defence which has been set up for the members of the committee of public safety had been well founded, if it had been true that they governed with extreme severity only be cause the Republic was in extreme peril, it is clear that the severity would have diminished as the peril diminished. But the fact is, that those cruelties for which the public danger is made a plea, became more and more enor mous as the danger became less and less, and reached the full height when there was no longer any danger at all. In the autumn of 1793, there was undoubtedly reason to appre hend that France might be unable to maintain the struggle against the European coalition. The enemy was triumphant on the frontiers. More than half the departments disowned the authority of the Convention. But at that time eight or ten necks a day were thought an ample allowance for the guillotine of the capital. In the summer of 1794, Bordeaux, Toulon, Caen, Lyons, Marseilles, had submitted to the ascendency of Paris. The French arms were victorious under the Pyrenees and on the Sambre. Brussels had fallen. Prussia had announced her intention of withdrawing from the contest. The Republic, no longer content with defending her own independence, was beginning to meditate conquest beyond the Alps and the Rhine. She was now more formidable to her neighbours than ever Louis the Fourteenth had been. And now the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris was not content with forty, fifty, sixty heads in a morning. It was just after a series of victories which destroyed the whole force of the single argument which has been urged in defence of the system of terror, that the committee of public safety resolved to infuse into that system an energy hitherto unknown. It was proposed to reconstruct the Revolutionary Tribunal, and to collect in the space of two pages the whole revolutionary jurisprudence. Lists of twelve judges and fifty jurors were made out from among the fiercest Jacobins. The substantive law was simply this, that whatever the tribunal should think pernicious to the Republic was a capital crime. The law of evidence was simply this, that whatever satisfied the jurors was sufficient proof. The law of procedure was of a piece with every thing else. There was to be an advocate against the prisoner, and no advocate for him. It was expressly declared that, if the jurors were in any manner convinced of the guilt of the prisoner, they might convict him without hearing a single witness. The only

Robespierre proposed this decree. When he had read it, a murmur rose from the Convention. The fear which had long restrained the deputies from opposing the committee was overcome by a stronger fear. Every man felt the knife at his throat. "The decree," said one, "is of grave importance. I move that it be printed, and that the debate be adjourned. If such a measure were adopted without time for consideration, I would blow my brains out at once." The motion for adjournment was seconded. Then Barère sprang up. "It is impossible," he said, "that there can be any difference of opinion among us as to a law like this, a law so favourable in all respects to patriots; a law which insures the speedy punish-able only to Pitt and York. On the next day, ment of conspirators. If there is to be an adjournment, I must insist that it shall not be for more than three days." The opposition was overawed; the decree was passed; and, during the six weeks which followed, the havoc was such as had never been known before.